Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. We are currently about. Oh, I'm okay. I'm proud of us. We're just about halfway through the Moose. That's not bad compared to our usual record. We're not halfway through stanza one. We're going. You know, it's about a bus trip. It's encouraging us to pick up the pace a little bit and get to our next stop. So we were just going to pick up with the woman in stanza 13 climbing into the bus. 0:41 Wes: Before you say that, I just want to make one little observation. 0:44 Erin: Oh, sure. 0:45 Wes: Just that we get right as soon as the light goes out, it's then that we get the barking of a dog and the smell of salt. First it's the smell of salt hay and then it's the barking of a dog. So smell is introduced. And is that the first time sound is really introduced in any. You know, we get the bus starting and all that, but I think that's right. It's very visual up to that point, I think. And then as soon as we lose the light, we get these new sensory modalities. The collie just supervised this dog, gives us a nice bark, and presumably we can't even see him. We just hear him. So I just love that. I just. I love the transition into darkness. It's so. 1:26 Erin: Yeah. 1:26 Wes: I don't know how else to say it. 1:28 Erin: Yeah. 1:28 Wes: And it's then that we. This really is the midpoint of the poem because now we're going to make this transition into the world of the bus, I guess. As the woman climbs in, we have 1:41 Erin: the ship's port lantern, as you said, being an indication that it's now nearly or fully dark outside. 1:47 Wes: She says red light swims through the dark. 1:50 Erin: Yeah. I'm assuming that at this point a bus would have some form of illumination, at least for when it's stopped and the doors open for people getting on and off the bus. Right. It would. It would light up on the inside interior. Yeah. 2:03 Wes: Yeah. 2:03 Erin: Or at least maybe it would stop, certainly if it were stopping at a station or a little, you know, whatever those things are called. Those little. Yeah, there's a word for it. 2:14 Wes: We need something to see the freckles by. 2:16 Erin: Right. We need something. Exactly. But wherever they would be stopping would have some form of street light illumination or something of that order. Anyway. 2:26 Wes: But it's interesting you say this, because I didn't picture a bus station at any point in this. And I just imagine people along the side of the road. 2:34 Erin: Right. But if it were a course, it 2:38 Wes: couldn't be that way. 2:39 Erin: Well, I don't think it's a station. I think it would be a stop with a. You know, like a lean to. You know, what are those things that just. 2:44 Wes: Yeah, sure. 2:45 Erin: That just protect you from the elements. 2:47 Wes: Yeah. Bust down. 2:48 Erin: Right. 2:48 Wes: Yeah. 2:49 Erin: And that would probably have at least a street light. But anyway, then we get the moonlight. Maybe my favorite. Oh, it's so hard to say, but maybe my favorite image in the poem is the hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lambswool on bushes in a pasture. Just. There's nothing. There's no image greater than that. That's unbelievable. 3:13 Wes: There's kind of a more wildness to this. Right. The image now, the hairiness and scratchiness and splinteriness. It's a bit less Domesticated, I guess, than the previous part of the poem. 3:27 Erin: That's a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. Even a suggestion of danger, like the lamb running. 3:34 Wes: I just thought, this is where the hobbits are entering Fangorn Forest. 3:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah, yeah, the New Brunswick. 3:41 Wes: But you go a little bit more. It's a little wilder and more primal. I think once you. Even if you're on a bus, once you get into the woods, there's something different about it. 3:52 Erin: That's right. 3:53 Wes: But yeah, you're right. The idea that the moonlight could get caught in that. That's a great image. 3:59 Erin: Something giving chase to the lamb would cause it potentially to get a little ensnared in the chase. 4:06 Wes: It's as if Lambswool has, you know, a lamb is brushed up on the bramble or whatever and left its wool so that. So the moonlight, instead of making this cosmic journey and landing on articulating the environment, has been subordinated to the environment. Right. It's become. It's been captured by these hairy woods. It's caught on it and, you know, a piece of it has come off from being caught on something that's scratchy and splintery. So that. That. Yeah, this is the great reversal. And that's the place where you can really get some good sleeping. Yes, right. 4:44 Erin: Yes. And where dreamy things can happen. 4:47 Wes: Divagation. Yeah, wanderings. 4:51 Erin: I looked that up. Wandering, straying or digressing from a main course, path or topic. So like a digression as long as 4:59 Wes: the bus stays on track. 5:00 Erin: Yeah, that's right. 5:01 Wes: You do whatever you want with your mind. 5:02 Erin: That's right. And the night. I just looked on Google Maps while I was writing my little notes in the margins. And if you were to take a bus today from Great Village to Boston, it would take like 10 hours. So it definitely is a, yikes, full course of the night on this night bus. So I love what happens in stanza 16, which begins in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us, but recognizable somewhere back in the bus. So I really love that it's grandparents voices, she says, uninterrupted talking. This is where the I becomes an us. And this is a characteristic of a bishop. I think she's rather reluctant to use an I, capital I in a poem. She's more likely to use a we or an us. And here it's as if they're all part of the same family now in the bus and the adults. It's almost like everybody on the bus who isn't a grandparent is a child and the adults in the back are talking and we are all, oh, that doesn't concern us. Just go to sleep. It's none of your business. Just stop eavesdropping on us. Right, so there's some community that's been formed already by the people who are not the grandparents talking. Do you get that impression? 6:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a bit confusing. So, yeah, let's try to figure it out. Because it. So it begins. A dreamy divagation begins in the night. She doesn't say, I started dreaming or they started dreaming or we started dreaming. Although it seems almost like it's collective. Right. So that the bus is dreaming or everyone on the bus is dreaming together, which kind of lines up with the not concerning us later on, the gentle auditory slow hallucination. So that's a very interesting idea. Right. The dream is usually associated with subjectivity. Right. The cogito and Descartes. Right. The dream tells us that we might have trouble distinguishing reality from what's in our own minds. And we in our own minds are very potentially cut off from reality. But it's a. It's an alienated individual position here. The dream is. Seems to be collective. And perhaps it's collective because it's partly real. Right. Is that the conversation? I thought, okay, there's a conversation going on in the back of the bus and it is old people talking. But as you're lying back, you could sort of. You can't hear exactly what they're saying. And you might have that kind of half dream, Right. Where you're. The dream is kind of lined up with or intertwined with what's going on in reality. So she's hearing in the conversation of the old people, her grandparents voices. Is that the way you took this? Or. Or they, they're hearing the grandparents voices or. Yeah. How do we, how do we interpret this? 7:54 Erin: I interpreted it as, you know, people of the age of grandparents having a real conversation. But the idea that one could be having an auditory. I mean, we are given the word auditory slow hallucination. So the idea that there could be an auditory hallucination or kind of half dream of one's own grandparents having a conversation, or it may be superimposed on a real conversation kind of inaudible going on on the bus. I never noticed this before. The G in grandparents is capitalized. So it does seem to sit to suggest the speaker's particular grandparents rather than. 8:30 Wes: Oh, I was going to. I thought you were going to say archetypal grandparents. 8:34 Erin: Oh, yeah, I suppose it could be yeah, it could be read that way, too. I think all of these things are true, right? 8:40 Wes: Yeah. 8:40 Erin: I mean, the image works because of the, shall we say, universal particularity of this experience. 8:47 Wes: The ordinary way to write the poem would be to. And a much simpler way would be to put this in her point of view and not try to put it into a collective point of view. But that seems to be what she's doing. 8:59 Erin: Yes. The effectiveness, though, I think is the. And it could just be the speaker's perception of it, but the atmospheric quality, because everyone on the bus is going to share an experience shortly, but already they are sharing an experience and a kind of atmosphere that they're all listening to the hum and having that. You know, when you're in the car and you. Maybe when you're a kid and you put your ear up against, like, the. The car door or the window or something, and you hear orchestral music. I don't know if you ever had that. I used to always hear classical music when I would put my head up. 9:38 Wes: Yeah, I don't think I have that. 9:40 Erin: All kinds of. And I always think, like, I should write this down. But you always have, like, a hallucination of an orchestra playing songs. Different songs. Sometimes like fantastical songs. Yeah. You know, my particular experience maybe doesn't quite get at the. Yeah. The sense that this is shared. 9:57 Wes: Well, you're put into a kind of dreamy state, and yet you're getting at the auditory hallucination part. I mean, for me, I think, as a child, and this, I think, is very evocative of childhood. It's something about being half asleep or falling asleep. You're on a journey and there are adults in the car and there's some. Maybe some sense of safety, I think is very relevant to this poem. But being ensconced in the world of adults and not quite alone when you do this thing, which is potentially very lonely, which is go to sleep. And of course, a lot of kids don't want to go to sleep because that loneliness factor. But it's a much different experience if you're traveling. You're all on the way to something together. And of course, you're with people who are awake and, you know, are going 10:45 Erin: to be awake, maybe because the kids are falling asleep. Their. Their voices are lowered and softer. And maybe that also contributes Right. To the. The way in which. That lulls the children in the back simply because they're aware of not wanting to talk too loudly. Certainly that would be the case on a bus like this, where they're Having a conversation where they're talking in. In lower voices and maybe actually inducing that calm and hum for sleep in the people, the other people in the bus who aren't talking. 11:15 Wes: And the question is, what are the adults doing with their talk? Right. It's not going to work if your parents are just fighting. In this case, it's the grandparents. Voices are clearing things up and I guess bringing certain things to resolution, coming to terms with these losses. But a lot of it does sound a bit gossipy and not necessarily like the most comforting. 11:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 11:39 Wes: Sort of talk we could imagine. Yeah. 11:41 Erin: Well, you know, in a situation like this where you might be a child in this car, could be that you're coming back from whatever, like a, like a late night and then the adults in the car are working through whatever has just happened over the course of the night. And. Oh no, she was the one who had that long. Yeah. Who had the criminal record because of that thing, remember where they. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like 20 years ago. So you sort of get that. But for an entire family history going back ages and ages, talking in eternity. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened. Oh, yeah, what year was that? Right. Something about the journey afterwards or maybe away from home. If these people are also. If their home is Nova Scotia and they're departing it, you know, then there's that backwards looking quality where something about the idea of the journey and moving away from the place is giving the opportunity to then take stock and look back. So there's this sort of like dual action happening in the poem where the further the bus goes, the further back they're kind of looking from deaths and sicknesses to then remarriage and then childbirth. Son lost when the schooner foundered. 12:58 Wes: These are all very blue collar tragedies, right? 13:00 Erin: Yes. 13:01 Wes: He was arrested for insider trading. 13:04 Erin: No, but I mean, you know, there's a reverse order to what's happening, you know, so we get. We have death, then sickness, then remarriage, then dying in childbirth. So there's a rewind is what I mean. Yeah. 13:17 Wes: Well, we come back in the end to death. The way it's all summed up. 13:20 Erin: Insider trading. Sorry. 13:23 Wes: Huh? 13:24 Erin: Sorry, Just insider trading. That really is funny. 13:31 Wes: And he had an affair. No. A sharp indrawn breath. Half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that. We know it. Also death, you know, and then the question, what does also death mean there? Death knows it, we also know death. But it, you know, it made me wonder at various points I wondered. Well, Is this an element here of a journey to the underworld or to the afterlife? Maybe it's a job not claiming that that's strong thematic part of this, but maybe a hint of that type of thing. Because the journey, I mean, and it does seem like journeys are good places for this or like when I travel, it produces in me a very different state of mind. And I do find it very calming in a way, you know, especially actually being on the train or something like that, because you're in between two different locations and you maybe you're not caught up in the expectations or the constricting qualities of any particular location. If I'm at home, I have to do this and that work, or if I'm at a destination, then I'm dealing with relatives or I have to be a tourist or something like that. But there's something liberating about being in between two locations. So it does seem like a place for this type of dreamy hallucination or this reflection or this clearing of things up. It's almost like therapy. Right? That's what all of this sounds like. People are talking through their problems, but where is it that they get to in the end here? The half groan, half acceptance. So it's not fully acceptance. It sums things up with this, maybe a degree of resignation. So yeah, I don't know. What do you make of the stanza? 15:15 Erin: Well, they're traveling west significantly. Right. I do take a lot of this to be a kind of, say, pre figurement of death, even though at the same time the fact that they're in the woods, the fact that not to jump ahead too much, the fact that the moose will come out of the woods and appear notably in the middle of the road, there is a suggestion of middle age or middleness, or midway in the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest. So I think it works both ways, or perhaps it's working in several ways simultaneously for the various passengers. So maybe the speaker is experiencing something more akin to the Dante esque middle of the journey on the bus. And something about the bus journey is also, symbolically speaking, a kind of final bus journey for some of the other passengers. And that intersection seems significant, but I don't know how, just in the sense that there's a retrospective quality happening or maybe even a reversion to childhood that goes on for the speaker and the other people in the bus by virtue of the propinquity to these old people at the end of their life's journey. Because there is very little about middleness Here, come to think of it, other than the moose appearing in the middle of the road. Right. It seems that the other people on the bus are like children and the grandparents are the adults. 16:50 Wes: I mean, I think part of what's comforting when we're children is that feeling that adults know the answers and that adults know how to cope with all the dangers and have experience doing that and therefore can protect us. The reality, of course, as we realize as we get older, is that that's not true. So what they may have is more of this acceptance that's sort of highlighted in this stanza, which is potentially a good thing, but maybe a double edged sword because it does seem to be a form of dying. It does seem to be a form of the very thing that we want to be protected from. 17:30 Erin: There's also, though, that. What I used to call my mom, the external hard drive. I used to say back before she. 17:42 Wes: She liked that. 17:44 Erin: I think now it would make her sad because she'll say, you know, very openly that she. Her memory is gone. But it used to be that she knew all the, you know, you could ask her who said that at that one. You know, there's that kind of. I mean, that's a sort of jokey, gossipy scorekeeping thing that she would keep tabs on. But there's also just the idea of long memory being the history keeper, the record keeper, the, you know, and there's sort of settling accounts over the course of this conversation. Oh, right, it was that year. Okay. And then this happened and then, then that happened. And that's important too, I think, for, you know, it situates children in a context. Not just say this idea of death that you're referring to, but also how to situate oneself in a life. 18:34 Wes: Right. 18:34 Erin: There's a. There's a sort of frame that the grandparents or the elder relatives have that whole history up until you enter the narrative and where you fit within that. We mentioned in part one a little bit about Bishop's family history just to kind of prefigure the types of story that she inserts, I think very significantly into the poem, particularly about poor Amos who just wouldn't stop praying in the store and had to be. Had to be put away. Right. Of course she does a gender swap, but yeah, we all have family stories like this, of this kind of unruly behavior or madness of some kind or other or some sort of family drama. 19:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's universal. But the way she captures it is very clever with this talk that we don't quite know whether it's just the conversation of the people, the old people at the back of the bus, or whether it's her dream or whether it's both or somewhere in between. They're interlaced, those two things. And that. That interlacing gets at this aspect of universality. Although I think by the time we get to the stanza where she's fantasizing about the grandparents and the featherbed, this, it start. Seems to become inescapably personal, which is why I think of the. The point of view is getting more and more focused. Right. With. With time. Yeah. And potentially it's still universal, but it seems almost like a personal memory. Right. So talking the way they talked in the old feather bed. Right. The way they. Her. Her grandparents presumably in the old feather bed, peacefully on and on. Dim lamp light in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shaw. Shawl. Yeah, get another. And get another dog here. 20:28 Erin: I love this. 20:29 Wes: The collie, the barking dog. And. Yeah, so this, this stanza is wonderful. And it gets at exactly this thing that you've been talking about, which is the, like, comfort of being a kid overhearing adults talking. It really, despite this talk of death. Right. A reconciliation with death. This is the point. Seems to be the point of view of a child who finds this very comforting. And. Right. She'll say in the next stanza, now it's all right now even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights, the way in which the adult world and the safety of protective figures can make sleep okay to do. And then suddenly that's interrupted. 21:07 Erin: But I love too. I mean, yes, it's so particular, but it also just in this one stanza does so many things in miniature that the poem is doing all along, this telescoping in again to a scene which. Which even as a child, if it were her childhood in particular that she's referencing, she couldn't possibly know or see. She wouldn't be able to see the grandparents in their featherbed. She would have to be picturing them in the featherbed and she wouldn't be able to see the dog in the hall. And also I wonder if this. If the stanza in its operation is kind of doing. I mean, this is just occurring to me now, but maybe it's doing that kind of hallucinatory work that has prior been described where we actually get a remix of, you know, this is the third dog in the poem. But it's also the elements in the stanza are a kind of recapitulation of the light, the red light swimming, the port Lantern becomes the lamp light in the hall. We get the dog barking now becomes the dog curled up in the shawl. And then maybe even because we also get kitchen, maybe the shawl is even a kind of transposition of the table, tablecloth shook out. Right. So there's something actually in the stanza which has that hallucinatory quality that she's describing where these three elements swim in the imagination and then become the lamplight and the dog and the shawl in this half asleep kind of dream space. Maybe that's pushing things too far, but it does seem to be. It's the dreamiest stanza perhaps in the whole poem. Maybe the following one. Now it's all right now even to fall asleep. But this gets interrupted that next stanza. So this one, I think is the real depth of the dreamy or borderline dreamy or hallucinatory moment. 23:00 Wes: Yeah, this is great because it really underlines the way deviation creates the capacity for stasis or for comfort. So the deviation of a bus trip or of the dreaming. Right. Which is movement, which is dynamic and has that momentum, forward momentum that we were talking about, sort of underwrites or grounds this ability to. For stasis, for stopping, for going to sleep, for feeling comforted as a child and safe, I think. And I keep repeating that word because of the. What's going to happen. The use of the word that's going to happen in this poem later. But yeah, I'm not sure if you were saying that explicitly, but that's what came to mind my mind as you were talking. This. The way in which this journey, divagation, motion can ground something that's going to be more static or stationary, which is what we're going to get in the moose. Because it interrupts the. It explicitly interrupts the motion of the bus and the external line of the poem in a way that parallels the comfort that's produced by the dreaming. 24:08 Erin: Yeah. In stanza 22 is where we have that break that you're describing. The moose finally appears. Well, the moose doesn't appear until stanza 23 finally appears. 24:21 Wes: We've been waiting for you. 24:22 Erin: We've been waiting for you. The title has promised that you would come and then here you are. It is foretold of your coming. 24:29 Wes: Comes through the curtains, takes his bow. Right. 24:32 Erin: We get nights, just as on all those nights. And then the moose's appearance, the lights turn on. And that rhyme you get, I mean, it's a very basic, simple rhyme. Right. But there's that sort of sudden jolt which is then also visualized where in the middle of night we have this appearance, this bright because of the headlights on it. Appearance of the moose. And it looms and sniffs at the bus's hot hood, which I'm assuming means that it thinks that the bus might be a boy moose. 25:06 Wes: No. Well, it's a very hot bus, I'll say that. 25:10 Erin: Ow. Ow. 25:14 Wes: That enamel. And it's dented and, you know, depends on if you like bad buses. No, just kidding. 25:21 Erin: Dented from its last encounter with a girl bus. 25:25 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because I wrote in my notes, but was just reading it stanza by stanza. And the previous stanza I'd said, okay to sleep, even with death looming. Looming for all of us, you know, all day one. You know, one day we all die. Looming in that sense. And then suddenly the moose is looming, standing there, looming. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting 25:45 Erin: that I. Oh, yes, chose. 25:48 Wes: Chose that word before I even got to the next stanza. Not to give some, you know, obvious rote sort of identification of the moose with death or the experience of the moose as having something to do with that. But obviously they're coming into contact here with something quite primal and important. It's not just, oh, look, there's a nice moose, but is he sniffing or she's sniffing the buses hot hood because she thinks it might be another moose. That hadn't actually occurred to me. 26:21 Erin: I must have been infected with that reading at some point that this was a frisky moose, that it otherwise doesn't seem frisky at all. It seems pretty. Like a pretty staid, respectable moose. 26:34 Wes: But frisky and ditzy. 26:39 Erin: That's right. Hello. 26:41 Wes: What? 26:41 Erin: Oh, look, I seem to be in the middle of the road. Pardon me. 26:46 Wes: So, towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house. We're safe as houses, a man's voice assures us. Perfectly harmless. Which you presume, right, that the. The man making that assurance is. Precedes the idea of it being homely as a house and safe as houses. Even though. So. So she interestingly puts the associations before her associative responses before the actual stimulus. Right. I don't think she's the one who is thinking about how they must be safe and. And he's saying something. I mean, as far as I know. I don't know back then. But you were warned about bison and mooses, right? Or is it mooses or moose? I think we're warned because they don't. They. They seem harmless, but they're not. And so I was quite surprised by this stanza. And I thought this idea, okay, safe as houses. Well, yeah, houses ought to be safe, but they're not always safe. The bus, the moving container of the bus turns out to be, in a way safer and more conducive to reverie and dreaming and all of that. 27:59 Erin: No matter how you slice it, whether you see the moose as harmless, truly, or not so harmless, this has got to be just a little bit of a wink, right? A man's voice assures us. 28:09 Wes: I mean, I think we're definitely meant to be skeptical. 28:12 Erin: Yeah. 28:13 Wes: This perfectly harmless line, it's not there for us to nod our heads in agreement. 28:20 Erin: Oh, yeah, he's right, right, right. I think it's more like, oh, here's another mansplainer. 28:26 Wes: He's moose splaining. 28:28 Erin: Mooseplaining this woman moose to moose splaining. Just out for a good time, having her existence commented upon by another man's voice. Probably a podcaster. One of those male podcasters has a manosphere podcast. 28:45 Wes: Girl mooses are. 28:49 Erin: Then we get these childish again. The passengers are like children and having this childlike response to the appearance of the moose, including. It's awful, plain sad. So much judgment of women's bodies. 29:04 Wes: I mean, they're not good looking creatures. Let's just. They're, you know, put that on the table. Come on. They are in an ugly sort of way. 29:11 Erin: Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess they don't follow, you know, classical proportions. They don't represent the golden mean. 29:21 Wes: They're not into beauty society societal beauty standards. All right. 29:28 Erin: They are like cartoon characters. 29:29 Wes: They're miss Positive is what they are. 29:35 Erin: Well, what I love though, about the description, you know, we get several, I suppose. Yeah. Contradictory descriptions of the moose in a way, because we get homely as a house or safe as houses. We get awful plain. But then she looks the bus over grand otherworldly, so she has some gravitas. She's like a great character actress who. Who may not be beautiful in that leading lady way, but she's Kathy Bates. Yes. Yeah, well, that's maybe a bit insulting to Kathy Bates, who I do think is a very attractive woman, but. 30:19 Wes: Sorry, Kathy. 30:20 Erin: I know, I love her. 30:21 Wes: Come on the show sometime, please. 30:24 Erin: Oh my gosh, I would die. I love Kathy Bates anyway. And then we get curious creatures. Well, first we get the idea that it inspires joy and then we get curious creatures. So there's a. The joy is then immediately undercut by a kind of ambivalence. Right. So there's just all of these descriptions of the moose combine to create a kind of ambivalent portrait, such as it is, of the animal. 30:47 Wes: Are we going to be able to answer this question? Why? Why do they feel the sweet sensation of joy? I mean, I think I would probably feel it. 30:57 Erin: Why? Why do we all feel it? I mean, they have. Well, they've successfully done what I couldn't see a moose in real life. So they're like one up on Erin. Can't wait to go back and tell her we saw moose. Yeah, I've seen certain things. I can't think of a specific example of this, but I've had plenty of instances. Whether it is a wild animal or, I don't know, like a sunset or a really spectacular natural event of some kind or other. You do get that feeling of joy, kind of excitement. 31:28 Wes: Yeah. Unfortunately, most of my encounters with large animals are at zoos. I did see a bear once. I was going to the bathroom. My mom had a house in Front Royal, Virginia, at the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was up high on a. We called it a mountain, but it was, I guess, more of a hill. But so it was out, you know, it was kind of. There was a bear on the mountain, let's just put it that way. And, yeah, I was going to the bathroom one day and looking out the window. There's a window right. You know, above the toilet. And suddenly there's bear's face looking at me. Wow. What the. So, but that, you know, and. And that was majestic. No, just kidding. That it was. I. It was surprising. 32:13 Erin: Yeah. 32:14 Wes: And there's an element of fear that involved. Even if you're, you know, even if, you know, black bears are harmless and there's a wall between you. Some. Something scary about it. I didn't have time to feel like it's majestic. Yeah. You know, like you have had these experiences in. In nature, but I can't think of a encounter like this. But it. I seem sure that if I had an encounter like this, I would feel exactly the same way. So. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? What is majestic about it? It's a big, dumb beast. And I say that with love, without any criticism in the sense that. Right. It's an encounter with something primal. And I think we have to take into account the size of the animal as well. I mean, it is interesting to run into a fox or something like that, but it's also a matter of scale here. But. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? I mean, I think the most. The most obvious part of this is that you know, we have lost something in our humanity and becoming language using creatures and becoming self conscious creatures. And sometimes when we're confronted with an animal like this, we're confronted with that loss. We're not as connected to the environment because of the intermediation of something like language, which poetry of course tries to overcome. It tries to put language into a disintermediating. Sorry to use these business terms. I don't know why this is happening. Into a disintermediation. 33:46 Erin: Actualize. Yeah, yeah. 33:49 Wes: When it. Yeah, right. Synergize it's agenda. Often where language might put distance between us and the world. Poetry, I think, can undo that distance. Like I was saying, with the very vivid imagery, I can undo that distance with figurative language. And maybe that distance is also undone to some extent by the dreaming or the half dreaming hallucinatory state that she was in. And the comfort of that, the return to childhood, which is also a simpler time. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. But yeah, I wanted to try to get more at this, you know, the otherworldly status of the moose and the joy that comes from encountering it. 34:34 Erin: I was thinking to myself, is the moose's gaze really clearly encapsulated? And then I thought, yes, she regards us amicably. And then I was like, no, no, that's the passenger who gets on the bus. 34:44 Wes: Right. Does the moose have freckles? Yeah, that'd be an interesting twist, right? 34:50 Erin: But yeah, but there is one. 34:51 Wes: Turned her into a moose. 34:53 Erin: Well, I would think that this would be a more garden variety animal encounter and maybe even a more, to use a word, I don't like, problematic poem in terms of its relationship with the animal. If it were to focus on the gaze of the animal. Because I think that is the thing which is often at the core of these interactions with animals in which we project or hope to have a kind of meaningful encounter. You want to meet the gaze of the animal and in so doing understand it. Right. And of course you don't realize that you're just projecting onto it a kind of maybe mutual regard. She regards us amicably. That you are seeing it and it is seeing you. And there's an acknowledgement and there's this, you know, spiritual encounter that you have with this animal. And all of that, of course, is often quite silly. It's often quite reductive and fanciful and unrealistic. But I am thinking of an encounter that springs to mind is in Utah. I hiked the same trail almost every day. And I Would often hike it late in order to escape the full heat of the desert sun. Which is a little dangerous, right? Because sometimes the sun would be setting and then all kinds of things come out. And one time I was trying to get back to my car before it got completely dark. And what I thought was a wolf, but what must have been a coyote. And the coyotes in Utah are huge. They look like wolves and completely white. Came out from over a hill, crossed my path, turned, looked at me in the eyes for a very long time, turned and went over on the other side of the hill. I mean, curiously, then, of course, I got to the car and I actually found out that a beloved family member, an elderly family member of mine, had passed away. And I said, I think I just saw her. You know, I had this feeling of, like. I don't know, the sense of this connection, inherent connection between these two. This woman who was dear to me and this encounter. But, of course, that's all silliness. And the idea that I was having a sort of interaction through the gate. Some sort of reciprocal. Right. Interaction with this animal was also entirely just my own projecting onto the animal. However, I will say that that's an instance in which I felt fear. But then there was also this, like, joy at the encounter, I think fear because it was dark. Because I wasn't actually sure if this was a wolf because it blocked my path. It was far enough away that I didn't feel as threatened as I might have. But it was definitely a mixed perception. 37:28 Wes: You didn't shoot it and then hang it around your neck. No, because I was thinking. I just suddenly thought of the albatross poem. 37:37 Erin: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 37:38 Wes: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And that sort of relationship to the natural world where. I mean, I forget what we said about it, but maybe I said something about envy and wanting to kill the albatross for. Because of its freedom or something like that. I don't. I don't know. But I think it's important because, yeah, this is part of something about the encounter with the natural world. Whether it's a big moose or something else. Yes. Is otherworldly. Strangely enough, it's otherworldly to us, even though it's where we come from. It's uncanny, maybe. And Freud actually, in the German, I think uncanny is sort of like unhomelike is what the German sounds like. And Freud made a lot out of this. I think it's home, but it's a home from which we've become alienated. We're animals, we're something more than animals. And so that primal encounter brings us back to that foundation, that natural foundation in us, but we can't fully come to terms with it. And I think the other aspect of this, I think the death. Right. So there is a link to death. Just. And I was thinking about that when you described thinking of it as seeing. As seeing your departed loved one. Because if we could regress to that animal state, it would be a kind of death. I think that the association with the movement to the pre. Linguistic, natural foundation is something like the movement towards dying, but there's something comforting. 39:07 Erin: Yes. 39:07 Wes: Right. And we encounter that when we encounter the gaze. To have a. Have a gaze returned by an animal like that usually like, like our internal. Our entire psychological structure, what makes us self. Self conscious is the internalization of a human gaze. Right. To the extent that we. We get an animal gaze, I think we are returned to that more primal part of ourselves. And it does seem to me to have something to do with being reconciled to mortality. Right. Which is part of what the function of that dialogue between the elderly people is doing. 39:44 Erin: You're leading me into the one, say, reading of the moose that I wanted to get to. And I just want to say that I think the great thing about Bishop and about this poem and all her poems is that the moose is a moose. It's not a symbol. I hesitate to offer any kind of 40:03 Wes: direct reading, but that's her job on this podcast, though. 40:05 Erin: I know, I know. It's. Yeah. In the letters with Robert Lowell when he's writing to her about her poem At the Fishhouses, he says, alas, all my fish just become symbols. 40:16 Wes: Ah, very good. 40:17 Erin: I hesitate to reduce. I think what you've just said makes me think that it's the maternal, the mother. 40:25 Wes: Which also brings us back to the house. 40:28 Erin: Yes, the house. Yeah. It's something that comes like the clapboard churches, like clamshells seem to arise out of the ground, if you will, or are directly compared to these native creatures. The houses are then in turn used as comparisons for the moose, the maternal. The idea that this is something that returns us to nature, that this is the encounter that we would have presumably upon death. It's the loved one that is somehow comforting, maternal, and is a female moose. It's moose mom. I don't know. I don't know. Something going on there. 41:04 Wes: Moose mom. 41:05 Erin: Natural and strange at the same time, not us. And I guess that's why I. That's why I mentioned that the story of my grandfather at the beginning, because I don't know why I wanted so badly to see a moose right after my grandfather's death. But there was something, like, logical about it to me. And I was familiar with this poem, but I very much did not have. You know, it was not something that was the forefront of my mind at all. But I think there is this inherent connection, and it's silly. You know, I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, but I do. I do think there is this kind of connection between this desire that I felt to see this animal. Like the particular kind of primordial itch that the moose in particular seems to be scratching for me in that moment. For Bishop, in this poem, something that is at once safe and comforting and from another world, natural in that kind of elemental way. 42:00 Wes: Yeah. 42:01 Erin: That all kind of coalesce in that image. 42:04 Wes: Very good. 42:05 Erin: Okay. I think that's it, Wes. All we're left with is the dim smell of moose and an acrid smell of gasoline. 42:12 Wes: Oh, you know, we should have talked about that. Maybe we can start with that on our next Bishop recording. We'll. We'll begin with the smells, the smells and the significance of that image at the end. 42:25 Erin: Nice. 42:25 Wes: That smellage at the end. 42:26 Erin: Smellage. All right. Thank you. 42:29 Wes: Thank you.

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild? 1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous. 1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless. 1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you? 1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish. 1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see. 1:56 Erin: I don't know. 1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild? 2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt. 2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it? 2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a moose on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all excited and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me. 3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white hart or something like that? 3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it. 3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both? 3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand. 4:22 Wes: Interesting. 4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic. 4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal. 4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on. 5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right. 5:26 Erin: Yeah. 5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading? 5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time. She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. 11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background? 11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hofmann, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sestina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified. 12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946. 13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this 13:04 Erin: was published in Geography III. So she finished it in the 70s. 13:07 Wes: Okay. 13:08 Erin: Geography III came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, Geography III is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that. 13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there. 13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to. 14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that. 14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a. 14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro. 14:28 Erin: That's right. 14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. 14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me. 14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while. 14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely. 14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else. 15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage. 15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized. 15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah. 15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5. 15:43 Erin: That's right. 15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead. 15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from The Bight on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar. 16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general? 16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography III, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich. 19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but. 20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it. 21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination. 22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there. 22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image. 23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide. 23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But. 23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border. 24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there. 24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry. 25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide. 25:52 Erin: That's great. 25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus. 26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area. 27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah. 27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the. 27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering. 27:56 Erin: Right. 27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the. 28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming. 28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil. 28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling. 28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely. 29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. and a collie supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I. 30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop? 31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content. 31:49 Wes: Content goes. 31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus. 32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful. 33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there. 34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right? 35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development. 36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the. 36:46 Erin: Definitely. 36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for. 36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get. 37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we? 37:12 Erin: Oh, yes. 37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two. 37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait. 37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet. 37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you. 37:29 Wes: Thank you.

The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.” Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s 0:25 Wes: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing. 0:29 Erin: That's also a movie. 0:30 Wes: I like the Mummy Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe. 0:38 Erin: Oh, there it is. 0:39 Wes: Rise of Cobra. 0:41 Erin: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like André Bazin and, you know, all sorts of. Susan Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case. 1:35 Wes: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming. 1:40 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 1:41 Wes: Lots of parallels. 1:43 Erin: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser. 2:16 Wes: He's going to be £300 in this one. 2:18 Erin: That'll be great. 2:19 Wes: Rachel. Rachel Weisz has to roll him around. I'm sorry. 2:23 Erin: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me. 2:28 Wes: I just going to be called Beached. 2:35 Erin: So mean. 2:36 Wes: The I love the whale. 2:38 Erin: Yeah. 2:38 Wes: I cried, like, audibly at a theater. 2:44 Erin: He's so great. 2:45 Wes: Yeah, he's great. 2:46 Erin: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic at Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment. 3:19 Wes: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin. 3:23 Erin: Exactly. 3:24 Wes: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that. 3:30 Erin: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over. 3:47 Wes: Right. 3:48 Erin: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved. And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature. And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation. So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding. 6:13 Wes: Right. 6:13 Erin: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which 6:21 Wes: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the philosopher Peirce on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory. So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity. 7:25 Erin: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the Hom-Dai and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well. 8:06 Wes: Right. 8:07 Erin: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme. 8:36 Wes: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal? 8:54 Erin: Because you got your girlfriend? 8:55 Wes: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain. 9:03 Erin: Right. 9:03 Wes: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing. You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like. So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed. 10:23 Erin: She doesn't have parents, so. 10:27 Wes: Did I do that? 10:28 Erin: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you. Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience. 11:26 Wes: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor. Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in 12:22 Erin: the field, as you were saying, not too shy. 12:24 Wes: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy. 12:27 Erin: She's sheltered a little. 12:28 Wes: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah. 12:42 Erin: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really. 12:52 Wes: Hear me roar. 12:54 Erin: Yeah. 12:55 Wes: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison Ford impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that. 13:19 Erin: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that. 13:21 Wes: Yeah. 13:24 Erin: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book. 13:30 Wes: Oh, yeah. 13:31 Erin: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world. 13:56 Wes: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one. 13:59 Erin: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants. 14:35 Wes: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical? 14:52 Erin: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast. 14:58 Wes: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed. 15:27 Erin: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy. 15:37 Wes: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think. 15:45 Erin: Yeah. She's angry. 15:46 Wes: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other. 15:52 Erin: Yeah. 15:53 Wes: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think. 15:58 Erin: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape. 16:19 Wes: What does he say? 16:19 Erin: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the Medjai when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three. They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Mina, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan? 17:21 Wes: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan. 17:28 Erin: Yeah. 17:28 Wes: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so. 17:32 Erin: Good. I love Dr. Bombay. 17:33 Wes: Yeah. 17:34 Erin: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy. 17:46 Wes: How do you mean? 17:47 Erin: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang. So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like Imhotep. 19:05 Wes: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and booze. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end. 19:18 Erin: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second. The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys. So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his 20:43 Wes: own, just add American flesh. 20:46 Erin: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you. 21:40 Wes: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films? 21:53 Erin: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right? 21:59 Wes: He's a category unto himself. 22:00 Erin: Oh, okay. 22:01 Wes: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on. 22:07 Erin: He's an electrical man. 22:09 Wes: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the. 22:20 Erin: I haven't. 22:22 Wes: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me. 22:44 Erin: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really. 22:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead. 23:14 Erin: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to. 23:24 Wes: Yeah. 23:25 Erin: Trying to feast on the living and 23:27 Wes: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever. And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us. 24:44 Erin: Hmm. 24:44 Wes: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called? 25:13 Erin: World War Z and then the Walking Dead. 25:16 Wes: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me. 25:21 Erin: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past. 26:02 Wes: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right. 26:19 Erin: It's not. 26:19 Wes: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in. It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way. 27:24 Erin: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified. 27:26 Wes: Sorry. 27:27 Erin: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it. 27:30 Wes: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words. 27:40 Erin: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is. 27:45 Wes: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. 27:52 Erin: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read. 27:57 Wes: Thank you.

As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.” Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: As a cinematic monster, the Mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the Mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he's not just dead, but wounded. Ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative, conveniently for the colonizer's psyche, the Mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him, not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand, the Mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archaeological and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy's tomb, his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the Mummy's DNA, in Shakespearean terms, part Antony, part Cleopatra, reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Today, we're discussing the 1999 film the Mummy. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I have two questions to start us off today. The first is, is this the silliest thing we've covered on the podcast to date, or was elf sillier? 1:41 Wes: That's a good question. It depends on what you mean by silly. Elf is sillier, but this is the most frivolous choice we've made. 1:54 Erin: I'm trying to figure out if you're mad at me for selecting this or if our listeners are going to be mad at me. 2:00 Wes: I hadn't seen it, except it might have been on in the background when I met my father when I was around 22, and he had hundreds and hundreds of VHS tapes of various movies that he had pirated. And there was always a movie on in the background when I was hanging out with my siblings. And I vaguely remember scenes from this because they were on in the background, but I had never actually seen the movie, and it didn't. I like mummy film. Horror films in general don't appeal to me, but mummy films especially, for some reason. 2:28 Erin: Oh, no. 2:30 Wes: So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing I would end up watching on my own, but it's an interesting. I could see, you know, I started. I saw immediately why it would be up your alley. Because of, like, screwball ish comedy. Right. It operates in two dimensions, so that was interesting. 2:45 Erin: This came out when I was 8 years old. We had this local video store that I used to go to to rent movies. When you walked in the door, there was a huge cardboard. I guess the technical term for it is a standee. You know, those big cardboard displays that they'll have in movie theaters or wherever to publicize a film? There was a huge display of the Mummy with different characters and right when you came in. So to me, it's sort of the ultimate summer blockbuster film because that was the thing you saw whenever you came in. And more often than not, you know, I was suggestible enough to think, oh, I could go for watching the Mummy again. Super fun to watch at a sleepover or on a summer night. So I love this film. I mean, I'm gonna try to expand our conversation to talk about the mummy in general, which I do think is kind of an interesting concept. And maybe we could talk about why you find mummies particularly uninteresting. But that leads me to my second question. 3:41 Wes: You can analyze me a little bit. 3:43 Erin: Leads me to my second question, which is, are mummies scary? And maybe this is why you don't like them. Because I think I have an answer to this, and I think yours is going to be the same. I don't know. 3:53 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. I was thinking about this film in relation to other horror films, including Alien, because we did that one. And. And I think it's a great film. And also the Exorcist, which I think is a great film. I was thinking, well, I'm not entirely opposed to horror. I'm not into horror films, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. And those two films have, like, a solid thematic essence to them involving relationships like, you know, Regan on the verge of puberty and an absent father and then an alien. The relationships between the ship members kind of alienated. And then this lack of a paternal authority. Just. Just like there is in the Exorcist and the ship computer called Mother. There's always a mother thing going on. It's hard not to think of that with the Mummy as well. But. So I was thinking. I'm not into jump scare films. I don't get. Although, you know, I guess I went to see it. Is that what it's called? The Clown? 4:52 Erin: Yeah. 4:53 Wes: Terrifying movie. And I actually did enjoy the. You know, because the audience would jump and then we'd all laugh at being kind of taken in. So. So maybe I do. You know, this is not. It's not very. A very fruitful analysis. We're conducting here. I'm too conflicted. But. But mummies in particular. Let's get to the point. Are mummies in particular scary? I don't think so. Horror movies used to scare me as a kid, big time. The Exorcist scared the crap out of me because even though I wasn't religious at that point, part of me believed in the devil just, just in sanctuary and I couldn't deal with it. And then other horror films, it like got into my bones in a way they just can't do as an adult. So in general, I don't think I can be scared in the deeper way that I used to be scared when I was a kid. And then this, you know, because this is also romantic comedy, I find it hard to be. To find any of it scary. Exactly. So, yeah, say more what you mean about scary and whether mummies are scary. 5:48 Erin: I just don't think they're scary. And that's one of the reasons why I like this movie. Right. Is because it's not scary. I mean, I don't like horror movies either. Right. But I like that. I like the Mummy as a concept. It's interesting to think of it in the Universal monster movie context and the Mummy as a monster. You could approach that from a lot of different angles. It's, you know, it's a dead body come to life. I mean, I think there's elements of the zombie in the Mummy. There's elements of the vampire and the Mummy in certain ways much, much closer to the vampire. But maybe we could tweeze that out a bit. I think the Mummy as a monster figure is scary, if you really think about it, which is a way of saying that it's not scary. So that's why you need, you know, the accompanying curse. Though maybe you can't really separate the Mummy from the curse, but you know, the Mummy that can unhinge its jaws and become sand and at some point Imhotep's little mummy army is climbing on the walls. That becomes a bigger part of the Mummy Returns, which is a truly bad film. I love it, but it's a truly bad film. So I didn't make us do that. Peeling the flesh off of people's bones and then also you have to throw in the scarabs. So you basically need this entire cast of supporting scary things, I think, in order to make the Mummy work as a horror film. I don't quite think of this as a horror film. I mean, part of it is also just the way that the CGI has aged Technically, of course, it has horror tropes, but it's just not that scary to me. Maybe what's kind of scary about it, in a thinky way, is related to the main reading of mummies that I'm interested in exploring, which are. Which is something like the mummy as a colonial fantasy. The colonizer goes into a place that doesn't belong to them, and then they start literally and metaphorically exhuming the culture that they've entered, either to leech off of it or destroy it. And then there's this curse idea. So they awaken this curse, which it seems anti colonial, like it's payback for disturbing the mummy. But in fact, it really kind of serves the colonizer in a way, because the mummy actually wants to come back to life. It actually wants you to disturb it. It wants you to fall into the trap of the curse. So the colonizer is kind of, in that sense, exonerated from the act of meddling in the first place and from colonizing in the first place by the psychology of this curse or the psychology of the mummy wanting to return to life. And then the colonizer has to also kill the mummy and restore order. So they cause the problem, sort of, but it's really more the mummy's fault or the mummy was asking for it. And so they caused the problem, then they themselves are the solution. And I guess that's a scary dynamic in itself for what it reveals about the colonial or the imperial psyche. But I also think that this dynamic can be extended in all sorts of directions. So it might reflect something in each of us about our own relationships to the past. Something silly like maybe we're all colonizers and we all have mummies inside of us that want to come back to life, and our job is to kill that part of ourselves and that desire to reenact the past or something like that. And maybe that. Maybe there's something scary about that, that element, whatever you want to call it, from something as. Maybe as simplistic as the return of the repressed to something like giving up on previous versions of ourselves or whatever the case may be. I mean, in this, in the mummy movies, it's a lost love that has to be ultimately abandoned or. Yeah, I don't know that that's scary, but that's the best I could do. 9:28 Wes: Well, I think once you start relating it to relationships, whether it's between colonizer and colonized or whether it's a love relationship, then it becomes scary. 9:36 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 9:37 Wes: Relationships are scary. But I think the key word There is preservation because the mummy, obviously, is a preserved. And I guess for the ancient Egyptians, it had something to do with preservation into the afterlife. Right. Why did they do it? Do you have firmer knowledge than me about this? Our research team was on vacation this 10:02 Erin: week, if I remember correctly. And see, this is. The other thing is, of course, I'm sure you had. Didn't we talk about this? You had an Egyptology phase, didn't you, as a kid? 10:11 Wes: Yeah, my grandmother was very into it and there were lots of books around, so I was very fascinated by it. And even today, one of the first thing I do when I go into a museum is go to the Egypt section. And the sense of being in contact with things that are that old and ancient, just crossing that gap is just very powerful for me. And you can look at the signs and it's, you know, this is 2500 BC, and yet these artifacts are so well preserved. And so you can think of. Try to place yourself back then. But the pictogram writing is so weird and alien. It almost is like aliens. And even I think some of the alien aesthetic. Right. Is in films from actual aliens is borrowed from ancient Egypt. So there's something about. Yeah. That combination of preservation and of artifacts and alienness that. That is really powerful. 11:07 Erin: Yeah. When I was a kid, I took a. I don't know if I ever told you this. I took a correspondence course on hieroglyphics from the Oriental Institute. 11:14 Wes: Oh, wow. 11:15 Erin: But, yeah, I was really into it, so another reason why I loved this movie. 11:19 Wes: Are you still. Are you fluent in hieroglyphics? 11:21 Erin: No, I can. I can recognize some things. 11:25 Wes: But apparently they did. They did speak actual, you know, reconstructed ancient Egyptian in the film. Yes, that's what I saw. Yeah. 11:33 Erin: You know, just one of the many great things about this masterpiece. 11:38 Wes: That kind of attention to detail. 11:40 Erin: Exactly. 11:41 Wes: You know, really lends itself to verisimilitude of. 11:46 Erin: The thing that always bothers me is 11:47 Wes: they say waking up and running around. Yeah. 11:49 Erin: The. The five canopic jars. And he's like, there are only four. That's such a basic thing to get wrong. But anyway, if I remember correctly, and I did not look this up beforehand, I'm sorry, but I believe that the Egyptians thought that you had three souls and that the preservation of the body involved needing a place for all of these souls to meet for you to become reincarnated. 12:12 Wes: Oh, right. 12:13 Erin: So that's funny. 12:14 Wes: We actually did a little bit of ancient Egyptian philosophy on the show. I'm part of, The Partially Examined Life, recently. 12:21 Erin: Was there anything interesting there? 12:24 Wes: Some stuff about. Yeah, there's these different souls. So we read something called the Instructions and one of the things we read was a dialogue between a man and his soul. One of the souls, the soul that was supposed to carry it off to the afterlife, I think. But it's just stuff taken from fragments of papyrus, basically. And I was surprised that so much writing survived. 12:49 Erin: I have some book on the Book of the Dead somewhere packed away in my. I have a lot of my library packed away right now. But, you know, a lot of the stuff like you can. You can read what's in there. And it's a lot of spells and a lot of protection type. It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. And of course, this is one of the controversies about, I think about the curse of the Pharaohs is that a lot of the supposed warnings about disturbing the body or else the curse will come for you were actually invented by newspapers in the 20s as a result of the fervor around King Tut's tomb. And the idea back then. Right. You know, I didn't. I didn't get the chance to actually research this further, but I was also reading that mummies were ground up and they were kept in people's like, medicine cabinets and they were actually. Yeah. And they were actually used. So. No. Another reason why I inherently love mummies. They're actually used as a coagulant. So Which I find so interesting. I don't know what the psychology of that is about or what that's about, except that they think that mummies are dried up bodies. So it'll dry up your cut or. I have no idea. But gross. It's also, you know, further like vampire connection, I guess, sort of. 14:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a good point. And now that, you know there's a preservation element in vampires too, right. Also to the point of eternal life. I mean, with preservation, I think we're gonna. We'll talk a bit about the love element, right? To this idea of everlasting love. I think that this movie brings in with it Imhotep and Anck Su Namun. How do you pronounce it? 14:27 Erin: Anck Su Namun. 14:28 Wes: Anck Su Namun. Anck Su Namun. 14:31 Erin: Or Marta, you can call her either one. 14:34 Wes: Oh, yeah. I know. It took me a while to figure that out. 14:37 Erin: But it's always an arrested development connection for us in every episode. 14:41 Wes: The thing that the Egyptians did with mummies is weird and gross. Right. We all know that. 14:46 Erin: Sort of. I mean, it's also kind of just Kidding. 14:48 Wes: Yeah. 14:49 Erin: Okay. 14:50 Wes: But it lends itself to the idea, okay, what are they being preserved for? Yeah, okay. The afterlife. Sure. But maybe they were being preserved for us in our museums. But also, I think, like the wrapping up in bandages, like a burn victim type thing, you know, it lends itself to the idea that, okay, well, maybe they could come back to life. And it connects to certain, I guess, folktales about the dangers of preservation. Right. Or fairy tales. I wish I could live forever, but then I live as a rotting corpse. 15:22 Erin: Or like, death becomes her. Have you seen that? 15:25 Wes: No, I haven't, actually. I know. 15:28 Erin: It's related to this idea. You live forever, but then you become disgusting and you have all these problems. Yeah, right. 15:34 Wes: It's like. It's like the. You know, the fairy tales where you have a wish and it's, be careful what you wish for. Because there's always a downside. Right. The wish is misinterpreted in some way or comes with a downside you didn't expect or something like that. But anyway, so, yeah, so there's the wish for eternal life, and then there's also the wish for eternal love, which I think this movie plays on. 15:55 Erin: It's interesting how the movie coalesces a lot of different things that are. I mean, it's almost a compendium of different symbols that the Mummy represents. So a really old idea about the Mummy is that they're a figure of pathos and a romantic figure, and they're actually a bunch of Victorian stories about people having romances with mummies or the Mummy being a figure of unrequited love. And I take this to be a really suggestive part of the Mummy's appearance, that the bandages suggest that he's somehow wounded or that he comes out of a wounded or incomplete or somehow interrupted past, or a narrative that he wasn't able to. To carry out and sort of wrenched out of that narrative. Right. So the wrapping seemed to suggest that interrupted life or that unrequited love. That was kind of where people's minds first went with the Mummy, this idea of the romantic lover separated from the beloved by death. And in the 1932 Mummy, that film also has the unrequited love thing with the Anck Su Namun figure and then Boris Karloff. I was really surprised by this when I went back and rewatched it. It's a really boring film. The beginning has a lot of interesting ideas about colonization, that the film then drops. But Karloff just kind of walks around, you know, trying to pretend to Be some normal guy even though he has really bad social skills. And he kind of hypnotizes the female figure in the film, the one who sort of lines up with Evelyn. He's almost like a Mesmer figure or very similar to the vampire where he hypnotizes her and draws her to him. And she is somehow. It's not really explained very well in the film, but she's somehow the reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, much like evelyn in the 1999 film. Something is made of the fact that she might be some sort of distant ancestor because she's also half Egyptian and half English like the Evelyn character. 17:54 Wes: So I think if some of that had been preserved, it could have made for a more powerful emotional content to the film. Right. Because in this case the threat is all just external to Evelyn. It's not like she is being possessed or seduced or something. 18:11 Erin: No. Well, he does kiss her at certain points and he does confuse her with Anck Su Namun. So I think they're trying to make that connection. 18:17 Wes: She kisses him too, I think. 18:19 Erin: Oh yes. To distract him. 18:20 Wes: The only completed kiss is she kisses him. 18:24 Erin: That's right. I don't want to know what a completed kiss is. Anyway. 18:30 Wes: He does get his tongue though back by then, I think. Sorry. 18:34 Erin: No, but she's supposed to be the human sacrifice for Anck Su Namun. Because one of the things that I guess I figured out about the the economy of this film is that Imhotep needs several men to become fully reincarnated. But I guess Anck Su Namun only needs one. It's just a one to one ratio for. For a woman. I really wonder about a lot of things in this movie and the logic. Like stealing the blind guys eyes and then the fact that the mummy doesn't need glasses. 19:01 Wes: But anyway, how about all you have to do is carry around the cat and you'd be good. 19:07 Erin: Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. 19:09 Wes: And they don't. I mean the first thing I do if I found that out is round up a bunch of cats, go to the shelter. 19:17 Erin: Exactly. 19:19 Wes: So that bothered me a bit. There's some few plot or in the beginning when like does she have to kill her? I guess she's trapped. So she does have to kill herself. Like that's the. That's the logical plan for him to resurrect her. Why couldn't they just escape together? 19:36 Erin: She so believed that he. See, this is like a perfect example of oh what, what do they say now? The opposite of he's just not that into you. Like, if you. If you. Oh, if he. If he wanted to, he would. That's the. The. The current dating advice. Right. So she was so assured of his love for her that she knew that all she had to do was kill her would find a way. 19:57 Wes: Oh, she's playing hard to get. Okay. 19:59 Erin: No, no, no. She's not playing hard to get. She's expressing full trust in his ability to overcome death, to rescue her. He's devoted. 20:09 Wes: You know, it's a love that's supposed to transcend everything. And as we know, that kind of love, there's a danger to it. Right. It can kind of blot out the world. And in this case, it could literally blot out the world once it's resurrected. So I think that's one of the ideas here, whether it's well thought out, is that this level of intensity in love can be destructive. And that's offset, of course, by the relationship, Rick and Evelyn, where they have a healthy level of antagonism. This is going back to Much Ado or screwball comedies. Right? The healthy level of antagonism that prevents you from trying to mummify and resurrect and get into all that creepy stuff. You know, keep it. Keep some boundaries. A little antagonism. 21:05 Erin: Well, they're together against the forces of death. Yeah. So in a way, they have a. They have a joint project of trying to. Trying to resurrect each other. 21:15 Wes: I'd like to see what happens if they. If Imhotep had succeeded and then 20 years into their relationship. I'd like to, like, a window in on that. He's sitting on the couch watching tv, and she's yelling at him about something. No, she's like, bandages on the floor. 21:34 Erin: Yeah, it's really good. No, no. She's like, I'm going out. And he's like, where. Where are you going? Just. God, I'm just getting drinks with my friends. 21:42 Wes: Leave me alone. 21:43 Erin: I'm allowed to spend some time away from you. 21:47 Wes: There you go. Ultimately, she ends up getting a restraining order on him. I resurrected you. You belong to me. 22:00 Erin: She gets half the contents of the tomb. 22:04 Wes: Yeah, there you go. So, you know. Yeah, it's all good until you succeed. Until then, it's tragic and eternal. 22:13 Erin: I like this idea that you're maybe the claustrophobia of this kind of relationship or this idea of preservation because it' related directly to the mummification ritual. You know, the loading up the tomb and trying to create the perfect conditions whereby you can survive. And somehow the effort expended on this is fruitless. One of the ideas behind whether or not there was actually a curse of the pharaohs specifically involved in King Tut's tomb. Whether or not people who entered the tomb were more susceptible to illness had to do with the fact that they would put food in the tomb, assuming that you would have to eat once you were reincarnated or after death or whatever. And so that food eventually, of course, went very, very, very bad. And there was bacteria found in the tomb that could cause a bunch of. A bunch of problems, including pneumonia and some of the people who entered the tomb. Yeah. But I think the idea is that there was this bacteria in the tomb, but that it wasn't enough to infect you or that it couldn't have survived for that long. You know, they found, like, the dead bacteria, something like that. But anyway, it was decomposing over thousands of years, releasing all of these acids and chemicals, and also the bugs that were eating these, you know, all of the. The fish and the. All those things that were in there, then those bugs themselves decomposing and creating really gross things inside this little lockbox. So, yeah, there's something, I don't know, maybe accidentally, metaphorically putrid. Right. About. About that whole concept of trying to preserve something unnaturally beyond its, you know, say it's sell by date. 23:56 Wes: Yeah. Like in Frankenstein, which we'll do eventually with. Right. He's reassembling, taking pieces of corpses and putting them together. And you almost say. Reminds me of high school when we did dissection, which I hated with a passion, in part because of the formaldehyde smell you get all over you. That you couldn't just do anything about this, you know, beyond the grossness of doing the dissections themselves. But it's, you know, I imagine, like the body of Frankenstein is sort of like a. Yeah. It's preserved, but it's not preserved in life. Right. It's preserved in death somehow. It doesn't decay. And you can do things with it, and maybe if it's your body, you can do things with it, but there's something dead about it at the same time. So the intention of seeing someone off into the afterlife, and I suppose it must have been largely symbolic, or maybe there was a. You know, did they literally believe they needed to eat? Or maybe it was a big controversy. Did they really eat the food or did they just symbolically eat. Right. The transubstantiation. 24:57 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they really believed that. Yep. 25:01 Wes: And there were factions and wars and. No. So anyway, yeah, the attempt at preservation, I think that, you know, your point is well taken. Can preserve something at the cost of its putridness. And then going to your colonialism idea. 19th century Egypt is a very different place than ancient Egypt. It's already been colonized, right, by a completely different culture. So the relationship is between the modern Egyptians of the time and that ancient culture, which is alien and also exploiters and, you know, like Napoleon and colonizers and conquerors who have that relationship not just to the local culture, but also to this ancient culture, which I think serves as a object of at least two impulses. One of them is just for the treasure and the other is this curiosity. And maybe there's a morbid curiosity there. What is it about our curiosity when we go into a museum? What's so fascinating about all of this stuff to us? And is there something a bit pernicious about it? Right, so there's something about the incredible preservation of a culture that's so ancient that is exciting and fascinating. But then we have to think about our relationship to that and what that's about, I suppose. Is it entirely well intentioned? 26:24 Erin: It seems to me. On the one hand, part of the intention is to feel a lack of difference or to feel some connection with this ancient time, with this culture that's really different from one's own. One wants to feel a connection to this. And that's a big part of the motivation for, say, going to the museum. But then also you want that difference preserved as well. You want to feel that this is thrilling and exotic and different from you. So you want to relate to it on the one hand and also don't want to on the other, or you don't want it to relate to you. You know, that push pull is also in the figure of the mummy. I don't know if I'm characterizing that in a way you would agree with. 27:06 Wes: We're looking into the past in a way. I think we're looking at our own origins. The origins are supposed to explain something about us, right? In a way they've given. They are not just our predecessors, but our progenitors. Right. Our ancient culture, you know, you remember in history class, it's kind of taught as if these ancient cultures were sort of the right. They're giving birth to everything that follows. We are who we are as civilized, supposedly people. Our civilization is built on top of those civilizations. So we look at those origins. It's almost like the fascination with parentage in a certain way. But also we can't overcome the alien ness of those origins. It's not unlike a relationship to deities and religion, where it's something about focusing on an origin. But also the concept of the alien is. Is ever a problem, or at least according to certain philosophers. Right. Hegel thought he was kind of solving that problem. Like faith in the Kantian sense leaves God too much of an alien presence because he's unknowable. And Hegel wants to say he's. Well, actually, he is knowable. So in this case, it's the unknowableness of the. Of Egyptian culture. Culture because it does remain really weird and alien. It's like it's hard to get your mind. It's hard to. Just hard to imagine what it would be like to be a person back then in that kind of society. Maybe this feeling is superficial. Maybe, you know, maybe we shouldn't look at hieroglyphs and various other artifacts and the strangeness of mummification and think that it's all that different. Right. These are people who are just people and have the same everyday concerns as we do. But I think part of it has something to do with this idea of feeling like we're trying to come to terms with a kind of origin that is nevertheless alien to us. It's no coincidence that people want to say the pyramids were created by aliens and that in a way, it's another sort of creation myth. They want to. Alien style. Where did human beings come from? Well, from aliens. You know, never mind the theological questions that arise from that. Where did the aliens come from? Why don't we just go straight to the source? We really need the middleman. 29:23 Erin: But anyway, yeah, what you were saying, even before you connected it, I was thinking, oh, yeah, this sounds. You're exactly right. This sounds just like aliens. And that, I think, is something that we also covered in our podcast on Alien. The idea that this is maybe part of what the film was exploring was obviously was sex itself or something about the sex organs themselves. And therefore also this idea of parentage and who our progenitors are, and the Egyptians are sort of filling that same role. The aliens that placed us here in some way. Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I had thought about, you know, Mummy versus Zombie, Mummy versus Vampire, but I really think Mummy and Alien are really the closest relatives. And I should have thought of that because I was also thinking about this film in relationship to Picnic at Hanging Rock, or maybe even a mirror image of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the kind of lessons of colonization that that film has. Maybe we could start with that in part two and Then maybe transition to looking at the film a little bit more closely. Though I still have a lot to. I feel like, to say about just the figure of the mummy itself, but we'll. We'll try to dive into it a little more. 30:29 Wes: Yeah. And get into the romantic comedy aspect too. 30:32 Erin: Sure. Thank you. 30:34 Wes: Thank you.

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Waiting for Godot. Erin, you wanted to say something about the typical characterization of them as tramps. 0:24 Erin: Yeah. Do you think they're as characters gaining a little bit from the association with, you know, as I've already talked about Laurel and Hardy, but also maybe Chaplin. 0:34 Wes: Yeah, I think that's meant to be an association. Yeah. Beckett actually talked about them. Right. As tramps, even though it's not referenced in the play itself. But he was involved in the production where he. I think. I think he gave some guidance on this, on their appearance and what they were supposed to be. But. 0:53 Erin: Yeah, I see. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to just argue that the comedy read is really the best way I've found to understand this is the trajectory of the Tramp. Often is this sort of dilation of time and funny business. I mean, you have in the figure of the Tramp the idea of someone who is always going, always moving and yet going nowhere. The ending, such as it is, you know, the famous idea that Godot never comes or that nothing, nothing amounts to anything in the end, is actually predicted in the Tramp trope, in which Tramp trope. 1:35 Wes: I was going to get a tramp stamp, but I decided on getting a tramp stamp. 1:38 Erin: I decided on the Tramp trope. But at the end of these little escapades, you know, these little serial adventures in the life of the Tramp, what happens? Nothing. Right. He might have a delusion of grandeur. Something might happen to him. You know, there'll be a little bit of a plot for the 20 minute silent film or whatever that he's engaged in. And then usually at the end, disappointment, back on the road, back where he began. No salvation, no social climb, no actual progress, but just movement. So movement without progress is kind of the life of the Tramp. 2:16 Wes: So at this point, right, they've just talked about, had an absurd conversation about whether to commit suicide and who should go first, you know, depending on so that the branch doesn't break for the second one and then leave them alone. And Estragon says, don't let's do anything. It's safer. And then Vladimir says, let's wait and see what he says. As if Godot is going to tell them whether they should commit suicide, or in what order they should commit suicide. Or maybe whether that there's some reason not to commit suicide. Estragon. Says who? Godot. Estragon. Good idea. Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand, says Vladimir. Do you want to go back and forth for a second here? 3:00 Erin: Sure. On the other hand, it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes. 3:05 Wes: I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it. 3:09 Erin: What exactly did we ask him for? 3:11 Wes: Were you not there? 3:12 Erin: I can't have been listening. 3:14 Wes: Oh, nothing very definite. 3:16 Erin: A kind of prayer. 3:19 Wes: Precisely. 3:20 Erin: A vague supplication. 3:23 Wes: Exactly. 3:25 Erin: This is funny. And what did he reply? That he'd see that he couldn't promise anything. 3:32 Wes: That he'd have to think it over 3:34 Erin: in the quiet of his home, consult 3:36 Wes: his family, his friends, his agents, his 3:41 Erin: correspondence, his books, his bank account, before taking a decision. It's the normal thing, is it not? I think it is. 3:52 Wes: I think so too. All right, so that's fun. 3:58 Erin: These are really, really fun to read out loud. 4:01 Wes: Yeah. So strike. Yeah. So you can see all the comedy in here. Strike the iron before freezes instead of while it's hot. 4:11 Erin: The anticipation of the end. 4:15 Wes: Yeah. What did we ask him for? Nothing very definite. A kind of prayer. Precisely. 4:22 Erin: Right. 4:22 Wes: So it's not definite, but it's precise. It's vague, but exactly. 4:28 Erin: Will he come tomorrow, Surely. 4:31 Wes: Yeah. That he couldn't promise anything. But anyway, so we. We get the idea that they don't know what exactly they're waiting on. What's. It's. It's very vague. And they. They even use the word vague. And the word prayer is used. And other times the word save is used. And savior. So there's some religious association here as well. 4:51 Erin: What's funny too, is in the middle of all this, it strikes me, on page 11, Vladimir says, your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives. And prior to this, I think on the very first page. 5:02 Wes: Yeah. Where did your worship sleep tonight? Or something like that. 5:05 Erin: Right, your highness? Yeah. And because of what happens with the stickiness of language with Vladimir, he starts calling even before they decide to play at Pozzo and Lucky on day two, or in the second act, he has already started calling estragon pig, a use of the term that Pozzo uses for lucky. So one wonders if, you know, the day before this they were. Vladimir was contaged by someone who was calling someone else your highness and your worship in a. In a sort of sarcastic way or something like that. 5:41 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. 5:42 Erin: We intuit in Act 2 that he picks up on some turns of phrase from Pozzo, but. Yeah, but it's funny that it comes up in the midst of this theological conversation which doesn't occur in Act 2. So those words, I think, aren't used at all in Act 2. But maybe from the beginning, Vladimir has come into this conversation already ruminating on this idea of the thieves being saved. And that's what suggests the sarcastic your worship phrase to his mind, rather than some other characters that we haven't seen in act minus one. 6:16 Wes: It seems to me to sort of reverse their roles a bit, because Vladimir is actually the one more in charge. And he has a name which is more. There's more half to it. Right. There's actually been princes, Russian princes named Vladimir and Estragon. Again, it's a name of an herb. Yeah. You get a sense Vladimir is more in charge. So it's a weird inversion to. Suggests that Estragon is in charge. But of course, you know, there is a sense in which the person who doesn't seem to be in charge is in charge. And in fact. Right. The diminutives that they have for each other. Gogo and Dee Dee. Right. Estragon, Gogo. And of course he wants to go all the time, but he can't, because they're waiting for Godot, which is almost like a combination of their names. Go and D. Go DD sounds like D almost sounds like this. It's like this, this, or here. Here versus Go. Go. Stasis versus motion and what Freud would call secondary process, and the kind of fixing something in one's attention and rational thought and planning, which certainly Vladimir has, versus just impulse, which is what Estragon seems to have. So to sort of say your highness or your worship is to raise the question of who's in charge. Is it executive function that's in charge, or is it impulse and instinct that's in charge? 7:42 Erin: To give maybe credence to your idea that Estragon is maybe secretly the one in control or in charge. Pozzo's name is confused with Godot. And Gogo certainly sounds more like Godot than Didi does. Though I like your idea that the name kind of combines the two in a way so that we could say that, you know, Pozzo is the more obviously dominant one of that pair. Godot, say in the pair that he's A part of. With the boy is certainly the dominant. And then Gogo, Estragon would be along that axis. Though, of course, these dynamics shift in Act 2. I mean. Yeah. From the beginning, Vladimir is saving Estragon, or trying to save Estragon from these people that apparently beat him up all night. 8:25 Wes: Right. 8:26 Erin: Which is, like, really sad, but also 8:28 Wes: really funny because he transgresses in some way. Vladimir suggests he's doing something to. 8:33 Erin: To antagonize them. 8:34 Wes: Yeah. So the idea that there's something impulsive about Estragon that gets a natural response. So what happens when Pozzo and Lucky arrive? Well, it's kind of a relief. Okay. You know, it's like, okay, something interesting is going to happen in this play. And it's kind of a traveling vaudeville act. It's more pronounced than the vaudeville act that we've already been witnessing and more extreme. And in a way, Pozzo and Lucky seem to be exaggerated versions of Vladimir and Estragon. So, Right. There's a kind of a bit of a master slave dynamic, maybe with Vladimir and Estragon, but it's very pronounced with Pozzo and Lucky. Lucky is literally his slave. And you can think of Pozzo as a harsh superego or as a. If you're thinking about it intrapsychically or on a social level as, you know, feudal lord or master. There's been lots of readings of this in terms of Hegel's master slave dialectic and all that stuff. So it's really quite. Quite a striking scene when they show up, right, with. So, you know, enter, Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed around his neck so that Lucky is the first to enter, followed by the rope, which is long enough to let him reach the middle of the stage before Pozzo appears. Lucky carries a heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket, and a greatcoat. Pozzo, a whip. And then, of course, the way he treats Lucky is quite, you know, quite extreme. Calling him pig and all that and having him give him the whip that he's gonna use to whip him. But from reading, I understand that the very first performance of this, people walked out. And I wonder where it is that they walked out, where it is that this became too objectional. Well, and I suppose maybe it's with Pozzo and Lucky, but you would think that would be the thing. Like, okay, actually, this is getting really interesting now, but I don't know. 10:31 Erin: Well, they've been predicted. I mean, very often, Estragon is the one who's introducing New elements to the dialogue, surprising twists in the dialogue. And one of them that he introduces, the question we're not tied, which he then raises again right before Pozzo and Lucky. Come on. Estragon also has the idea of the necessity for testing the branch to determine their weight before they kill themselves on it, because he doesn't want the branch to not be able to hold whichever of them is heavier and have the heavier person go second so that they don't successfully kill themselves. Something which it takes Vladimir a second to catch up on. Which is a surprising moment because Estragon makes sense and thinks logically about something before Vladimir can intuit it. But both of those instances are about being tied to each other or to Godot in terms of their fates and then being sort of weighed in the balance, maybe like scales connected, like the two thieves, maybe on the. On the. The crosses on either side of Christ. And then we get Lucky and Pozzo coming on to tied together by this rope. Yeah, I like this idea that they're an exaggeration of Estragon and Vladimir. And there are some of the same elements that recur in the Pozzo Lucky dynamic, though twisted. So we get the turnip that Vladimir gives Estragon and then Pozzo with the chicken bone. I don't know. I guess maybe it doesn't really work. Erin, it's a carrot. Sorry. 12:07 Wes: Right. Accidentally gives him a turnip, but he doesn't. Estragon doesn'. I bring that up because Vladimir really does care about Estragon and is feeding him. 12:17 Erin: Yes. 12:19 Wes: Whereas Pozzo's abusing Lucky and Lucky gets the bones. Right. So the. 12:25 Erin: Right. 12:25 Wes: Right. Pozzo takes out the chicken and eats it himself instead of, you know, whereas Vladimir was offering Estragon food. And then Estragon gets the bones that usually Lucky gets. Usually gets the scraps, gets the leftovers. 12:39 Erin: Right. 12:39 Wes: Pozzo is much more imperious and pompous and condescending than Vladimir, and he's a rich man and they're on his land, except the road is free to all, which is a disgrace and blah, blah, blah. So I think that Vladimir thinks he's Godot at first, Right? 12:56 Erin: Yes. Well, they're not sure, or they hear the sound first and they think that sound is potentially Godot coming. Right? 13:03 Wes: Yeah. Vladimir Godot. Estragon says yes. And then Pozzo presents himself as Pozzo and Estragon says he said Godot. So I guess Vladimir realizes quickly that he's not Godot. 13:17 Erin: That's right. And it's in the second act. That I think they say that they're saved. And when they first hear Pozzo and Lucky coming, I think actually the two of them cower at the sound. Yeah. So you're right. He actually does think he might be Godot. 13:31 Wes: So Pozzo accuses him of Pozzo, says, you took me for Godot. And Vladimir says, no. Oh, no, sir. Not for an instant, sir. So, Lyon, who is he? Oh, he's kind of an acquaintance. Estragon? Nothing of the kind. We hardly know him is Vladimir. True, we don't know him very well. But at the same time, Estragon, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. Pozzo, you took me for him. So. Yeah. What's this insistence on the idea that they took him for Godot? You know, it may have something to do with what I was talking about early in the first part, which is just this. Godot could be representative of dramatic resolution or suspense or a plot point. It could be representative of some aspect within a play. So it's almost like saying to the audience, you took me for some item of significance in the play or some plot development. Well, when this play doesn't actually have a plot, or you might say, on my reading, having to do with the foolishness of being so invested in the future, or perhaps even invested in one's ambitions, which are very future oriented. You took me, the rich man, as the thing that you wanted to be or the thing that you're waiting for, expecting. But of course, Estragon and Vladimir, too, I don't think they're not organized enough to give content to Godot in that way. If they're mistaking Pozzo for Godot, it's simply right. It's more a function of this idea that they really. Godot doesn't have any content for them, except that he might save them from something which doesn't have a lot of content either. 15:10 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's sort of suggested by the. To take something for something else. There's a sort of interchangeability or like a displacement, I suppose. But then also there's inherent in that maybe, you know, the colloquialism. What do you take me for? Yeah, I love Vladimir saying, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. 15:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 15:32 Erin: Pozzo seems incredulous at the thought that he could be taken for someone else because of his singularity or something. You know, he says disparagingly, of the same species as Pozzo, made in God's image. Yeah. The idea that other people would be the same Species as him seems like something distasteful. And so he repeatedly refers to Lucky as a pig and a hog, but says he cannot go for long without the society of my likes. Even when the likeness is an imperfect one. 16:02 Wes: He's gonna deign to, right, to hang out with these guys and, you know, have this feast in front of them, chicken and wine, without offering it to them. So at least they're, you know, they're lesser than him. He's a rich man who owns all the land. But they're. No, they're not. Lucky levels the road is free to all. Yeah. Which he then says is a disgrace. Right. So again, if we were to read this intrapsychically, we might think of it in terms of this relationship between some grandiose aspect of ourselves and then something that's been disavowed. Lucky is the disavowed shadow self that we want to cast off. Or maybe it's the part of us that's being beaten up and abused for being less than. But I think the dynamic of that is to put Pozzo in a position. Why isn't he in his manor, right, with the Stein. He mentions the Steinway. That's where he left his watch. Why isn't he in the manor with the piano entertaining him? Well, he's off to sell Lucky at the fair, right? But he could have someone do that for him. But anyway, he gets put into the position of being a wanderer through a desolate wasteland, which is not quite what we would expect a nobleman to be doing. You get the sense that he's right. He says it himself. What he's really looking for is company. But it's hard to have company if you are that pompous and high up and unaware of the well being of others. Right. Have company in the truest sense. 17:39 Erin: The other element or the other dynamic in his relationship with Lucky is one of the parasitism, I suppose, or as if the rope is an umbilical cord that has allowed Pozzo to leech off of Lucky. Right. Is that the implication that Lucky has previously been able to think and speak and that Pozo has learned things from him or acquired things from him until Lucky becomes hollowed out and unable to make any sort of coherent statement. 18:12 Wes: Yeah, it's quite Lucky, actually. He starts weeping because of what. What Pozzo says here, right. Which is that he's learned so much from. From Lucky. They're inquiring why he doesn't put his baggage down, right. And Pozzo ends up saying he wants to Impress him and mollify him. And then Vladimir is surprised by the idea that Pozzo would want to get rid of them. You know he's going to bring him to the fair. Then there's the whole scene where Estragon gets kicked and Pozzo gives that great speech about the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else, another stops, right? Lucky's tears go to go to Estragon. 18:50 Erin: Underneath, Pozzo says, guess who taught me all these beautiful things? My Lucky. But for him, all my thoughts, all my feelings would have been of common things. Professional worries, beauty, grace, truth of the first water. I knew they were all beyond me. So I took a knook and Vladimir says, a knook? And I looked that up. I couldn't find anything about it, except for stuff about Waiting for Godot and where the origin of that word might be from. 19:16 Wes: Maybe it's like a niche profession. 19:19 Erin: But yeah, that was nearly 60 years ago. Yes, nearly 60. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you? Compared to him, I look like a young man. No? So, also implying that he's physically sustained himself on the deterioration of Lucky. And then Vladimir says, after having sucked all the good out of him, you chuck him away like a. Like a banana skin. 19:40 Wes: Vladimir abuses him for the way he treats Lucky and all that stuff. And Pozzo ends up collapsing, right? Well, Vladimir even uses the word crucify. He's crucifying Lucky. But. But Pozzo's claim is that Lucky is killing him. He used to be so kind, so entertaining, so helpful and entertaining, my good angel. And now he is killing me. But anyway, I guess I wanted to kind of lead into that twilight speech that he gives. So it's another great speech. And then we'll probably have to talk about Lucky's speech as well. Let's read the whole thing. Just kidding. So everything seems black to him today. Except the firmament, says Pozzo. But I see what it is. You are not from these parts. You don't know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you? And then he makes sure that everyone's looking at the sky, including Lucky. Will you look at the sky, pig? Yikes. What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at any at this hour of the day in these latitudes when the weather is fine. An hour ago, roughly after having poured forth even since say 10 o' clock in the morning, tirelessly torrents of red and white light, it begins to lose its effulgence to grow pale, pale, ever a little paler, a little paler, until poof, finished, it comes to rest. But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging and will burst upon us. Pop. Like that. Just when we least expect it. That is how it is on this bitch of an earth. Yeah. So what is that doing? What's the function of that speech, if there is any? You get the sense that it's another bit of parody of something that we might expect to see in a. In a play, right? Some sort of crescendo, emotional crescendo, along with a great speech. So maybe it's a parody of a great speech, but it also points to the concept of death, right? And the coming of night, which seems to be the alternative to the coming of Godot. Or somehow coupled to it, maybe. 22:04 Erin: I take it also to be this expression of balance that. That I've already talked about, the pairs expressing half of a dynamic. So in Night and Day, you have the two sides of the coin. Maybe one thing that I didn't mention, or maybe that we just alluded to, is Vladimir's obsession with his hat versus Estragon's, as we talked about with his boots. Right? And then not too long after this Night and day speech, Estragon will tell Pozzo, he, meaning Vladimir, has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. So there's a sort of heads and tails, night and day. Night and day thing is kind of like a one damn thing after the other. But it's also yin and yang balance, the cyclicality of that or whatever. 22:53 Wes: So what do we make of Lucky's monologue? So they. Yeah, they have Lucky think, right. Given the existence is uttered forth in the public works of. Is it Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God? Kwa kwa kwa kwa with the white beard. Kwa kwa kwa kawa outside time and extension, who from the heights of divine apathia Divine athambia Divine aphasia loves us dearly, with some exceptions, for reasons unknown. But time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda, blah, blah, blah, for a long time. And apparently Beckett and the production he was involved in, he wanted this to be read very, very quick, as quickly as possible. 23:32 Erin: Well, this is the most Joycean part of the play to me. Yeah, I do. I really enjoyed, actually, the Lucky speech part of the 2001. That was the only one that I saw performed. I liked the fire and brimstone kind of element of it because I think of this, or I thought of it on the page and perhaps still do as being a parody of an academic kind of treatise. So I wasn't expecting the lucky performance in the 2001 adaptation to be so preachery from the pulpit. Kind of air to it. 24:06 Wes: Yeah. So again, another evocation of religious questions and perhaps academic thinking about the existence of God or something like that. But it's all become fragmented, much like the play as a whole. Right. Maybe it's like someone took a play and took a bunch of phrases and Scrabble tiles and shook the bag and then put them back out on the board. And this is the play. This is the play you get with 24:37 Erin: the repetition of, for instance, the names or the different turns of phrase left unfinished. It is established, you know, the KWA KWA quas and all that. It somehow performs in this really absurd way, these themes of. It's like an expression of ellipses or something. Like the ellipses are somehow being contained within the words or the expressions with which he's sort of extending the time. Again, it's like this dilation. Some of the things that I just teased out that I was writing in the margins, 25:15 Wes: I have. 25:15 Erin: Waiting, uncertainty, time filling, suffering, irrationality, inability of speech. But, yeah, I don't know. Something like what you get from a lecture if you're kind of falling asleep, or maybe what you remember from something several days later. Something that was long and boring and you only caught snatches of it because you were only half paying attention. Something like the. The result of having heard a highfalutin and incomprehensible and maybe kind of boring lecture. You know, since we were on the Pozzo portion. Pozzo pulls out his pipe and smokes one. And then. And then he decides to have another. And he says, the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. It occurred to me that this was a revision of the carrot idea that Vladimir and Estragon talk about. On page 13 in my edition, Estragon is eating the carrot and says, funny, the more you eat it, the worse it gets. Vladimir says, with me, it's just the opposite. Again, it. It two different. It's there. In other words, Estragon says, Vladimir, I get used to the muck as I go along. And then Estragon says, is that the opposite? Vladimir says, question of temperament. Estragon of character. Vladimir, nothing you can do about it. Estragon, no use struggling. I don't know. I really love this. The change in the carrot versus the change in you as you eat the carrot? 26:47 Wes: Yeah. The more he eats, the worse it gets. And Vladimir gets used to it. Estragon's question is getting used to it. The opposite of things getting the more you eat it. Right. Because you might think the more you eat, the better it gets. Right. That's the joke. The opposite would be the more you eat, the better it gets. Not getting used to it. And then. So why is the response there? Question of temperament and character. 27:15 Erin: Because it's still possible to get used to something. You get used to the muck as you go along. So you're just getting used to it, getting worse. So the question isn't whether or not the carrot has changed. I suppose the carrot is going to get worse. That seems to be the assumption. But it's just a matter of whether or not you can get used to that quality of it. 27:33 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the suggestion is that depending on one's character, one might get used to things or get more sick of them with time. And then there's the, you know. Right. If it's character, it's fate. If it's character, it's essence. The essential doesn't change and there's no use in struggling to change. There's no use in trying to be different. At Estragon, there's nothing to be done, so you can't change yourself. So this is, you know, this is the opposite. This is sort of the foil to existentialism. Right. Existentialism is predicated on the idea that existence precedes essence. So existence, as in the foundation to our free will, that we can freely choose something and aren't just reducible to some essence, to some deterministic essence that forces us to be one way or another. I did it because that's my character and there's nothing I can do about it. This is kind of an explicitly anti existential statement. 28:32 Erin: Well, I just took it as our way of a roundabout way of talking about Act 2 without actually having to go there. Second is never as good as the first. 28:41 Wes: Related to the pipe again. 28:45 Erin: Yeah, he says the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. So he has a slightly more tinged by privilege, a more positive view of the repeated activity. Still having some savor. 29:01 Wes: You know, you can be eating raw carrots and have them go from bad to okay or bad to worse. Right. Bad to worse. Is Estragon bad to okay? Is Vladimir? Or you could be eating really good chicken and wine and having a pipe. All these things that are much better to begin with than A raw carrot. And the pleasure degrades a little bit as you go along, but it's still much better than a raw carrot. 29:31 Erin: Right. 29:32 Wes: It helps to start our heart. Start from a good height so that when you come down, you're not hitting the ground. 29:39 Erin: That's true. That's true. But I like the idea of the. The entropy inherent in repetition, which seems to be like a. Like a meta joke about the play. 29:49 Wes: So, speaking of repetition. Yeah. Things repeat in the second act and we get Pozzo and Lucky arriving again, but this time Pozzo is blind and the rope is shorter. Yeah. What's the point of repetition here? 30:03 Erin: I love when Vladimir says reinforcements at last when they come on stage Again, very much to your point, that we're. We're sort of relieved to see them. 30:12 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. He's speaking for the audience at that point. 30:15 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. This time, again, I'm really intrigued by the. Either side of the scale. So. So there's a. 30:21 Wes: By the way, there's a lot of tedium. To my mind, before they arrive, they do a question and answer routines. 30:28 Erin: They insult each other for. 30:30 Wes: Insult each other. Yeah. They try all these different things to be interesting, but it's really just boring. They exchange insults, do their exercises. 30:39 Erin: They do the hat business because there's the third hat. 30:43 Wes: Yep. Speaking of logical routine. Yep. 30:46 Erin: And the idea of the boots, whether or not the boots have been replaced, which also kind of is a recapitulation of the worst carrot, in a way. There's sort of shades of the worst carrot in that. 30:58 Wes: Right. And then there's a suggestion that someone for whom you know, has come along, whose boots are too small for their feet, and then taken Lucky's boots, which means that, you know, Estragon's boots must be. Sorry, Estragon's boots. Which means they must be bigger than that person's boots. 31:17 Erin: And yet somehow that they might fit Estragon. Right. So. But they will have simply gotten smaller. So there's. 31:23 Wes: They must be smaller and yet they fit Estragon. Yeah. So. 31:26 Erin: Right. So again, there's a. There's an entropic quality. Yeah. 31:31 Wes: It's a failure of what kind of. Maybe in math is transitivity or something like that. If A is smaller than B and B is smaller than C, then A 31:41 Erin: should be smaller than C. Exactly. And one of the things also that I just wanted to point out about the ways in which maybe the play behaving in absurd ways even extends to the scaffolding in the text of the play, the stage directions. Reading it, I Think is a really important experience in addition to seeing it. Seeing it bring something, obviously, to the text. It's meant to be seen. But also, if you were only to see it, then you would not have the experience of discovering that the characters sometimes contradict the stage directions or don't seem to acknowledge the stage directions. So if we were just to see this play, we would. Or we wouldn't know, or maybe we would question the fact that these are, in fact, just Estragon's boots from the day before. We're told in the stage direction that they are Estragon's boots, but the characters argue over whether or not they are. 32:34 Wes: And they're said to be a different color. Yeah. 32:36 Erin: Estragon and Vladimir argue over whether or not the tree, you know, the instructions that were given them, I suppose, is that Godot was gonna meet them by the tree. Then they argue over whether or not it's actually a tree. But of course, it's called a tree in the stage directions. There's another example of this, or even just the way that the tree kind of acts in a strange way that it's supposed to be the next day, but it has all these at least a handful of leaves on it now overnight. Or that Pozzo is blind overnight and Lucky is mute overnight. That's another undermining element or an unruly element of the way that the play is working, which makes it doubly absurd or even more questionable, ultimately. Whether or not we could read this allegorically, for instance, is that even the stage direction sort of seek to undermine any kind of stability in the text. Back to Lucky and Pozzo. Now we have Pozzo being blind. And so the interesting dynamic, which is granted, made more obvious or more. More definitive in Act 1 by the fact that, of course, Lucky is loaded down with all these bags and Pozzo has a whip, is complicated. Or maybe the. The complication that was already there in this image of the two of them yoked together by the rope is just more apparent in Act 2, where Lucky is actually preceding Pozzo, right. Going before him. And so now we can say that Lucky is leading him around in Act 2 because of Pazo's blindness. So again, there was already kind of an uncertain. I mean, it's on the one hand, very clear power dynamic between them, of course, but on the other hand, something interesting is happening visually on stage, even in Act 1, where, again, this idea of balance, or either side of the scale where they're tied together, the power dynamic, obviously, then shifts really definitively in the second act, where Pozzo is being just led around by Lucky. 34:34 Wes: Basically, we get. In the end, when Pozzo arrives, he asks what time it is. And then there's some question of whether it's, I think, evening or dawn, right? Estragon and Vladimir argue. You know, Vladimir says it's evening. But, well, Vladimir actually says something very, very interesting. It's evening, sir. It's evening. Night is drawing nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it, and I must confess, he shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through this long day. And I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory. How do you feel now? So, right, we're coming to the end of the play seems to be the suggestion, and he knows it. And then we get the stuff with Pozzo claiming that the blind. Oddly. So here's how he puts it. Don't question me. The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them, too. Vladimir says, well, just fancy that. I could have sworn it was just the opposite, right? So that he should be a Tiresias if he's blind, right? He should be a character who is prophetic, who can tell us what's in the future. But Pozzo doesn't even want to be, you know, he gets very irritable later on. And Vladimir says, dumb. Since when? Right? They keep asking them these time questions. Pozzo says, have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It's abominable. When? When? One day. Is that not enough for you? One day he went dumb. One day I went blind. One day we'll go deaf. One day we were born, One day we shall die. The same day the second. Is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. And then on jerks the rope and says on to Lucky. It's reminiscent of the Twilight speech, right? Which also ends with night. But it's much more staccato. It's briefer. It's got the staccato quality. It's more impassioned and maybe authentic, less pompous. It doesn't come across as the same sort of parody. It's heartfelt and it's almost like a reduction, like in cooking, right? It's reduced more to its essence. But once again, night, Right? Yeah. Night person. And then distance between morning and night has been collapsed in Pazo's original speech, I think, right? There's. He sort of hesitates and fumbles around the idea that the light has been going all day long. And you get some sense of some expanse of time. And here all of time is collapsed, right? You give birth astride of a grave, as if nothing happens in between. Or there's not time enough for anything to happen between. Everything is the same moment. 37:22 Erin: That's right. And then Vladimir will take that and expand on it in what I think is maybe the most Shakespearean speech. Yeah, he does dilate that a bit. So he says. So here's. Here's the full little paragraph. Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do? What shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot. That Pozzo passed with his carrier and that he spoke to us. Probably. But in all that, what truth will there be? He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth down in the hole, lingeringly the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old, the air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking. Of me too, someone is saying. He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on. I can't go on. 38:28 Wes: What have I said with Pozzo? It's as if birth and death are happening in the same moment. But as you. As you point out, Vladimir dilates this, so to speak, with the forceps. Right, so. But. But it's the gravedigger is there lingering, you know, doing things lingeringly. Right, so. So it actually takes a lot. The birth takes a long time. And the whole process of birth is the duration of our lives. And we have time to waste them, to be bored, to not do anything, to kind of live a death in life, which is much worse than the thing that Pozzo was talking about. 39:07 Erin: And habit is that death. This is the second, I think, use of the term. In the play a few pages earlier, Vladimir says. All I know is that the hours are long under these conditions and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which. How shall I say? Which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit beguiling the time tomorrow, sleep. All this stuff is, you know, very Macbeth also, of course, very Hamlet. But. 39:35 Wes: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I noticed this too. Yeah, the tone of the speech. Yeah, it's very high. 39:40 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah. So he becomes Vladimir, becomes Really quite profound over the course of Act 2. So maybe that's one thing that sort of pushes against the entropy reading. This idea of habit, I think, is introduced rather late. It's an interesting characterization of what's gone on. Is it habit that they've been waiting for, Godot? 40:02 Wes: Well, there's something passive about habit, right. Because we're not deliberating and we're not taking conscious action. We're just, you know, we're doing what we do out of. Out of habit. I mean, it sort of. It speaks to that whole thing with the carrot. Right. And getting used to something. Right. As a matter of habit. If you eat enough, you get used to it. And it'd be inert to whether, you know, it might be the habit of eating the carrot sort of blinds you to something that's better, something that's more tasty. And the same thing in life. You sort of get into death drive mode. And the parts of life that you know would involve more vitality, you are habituated out of. Out of seeking that, out of inhabiting that. Because you're in sort of inertia mode, I suppose. 40:52 Erin: But they don't eat the carrot out of habit, right? I mean, everything they're doing, they're doing out of a kind of desperation. And they're eating the carrot because they don't have anything better. And when they have something better, even if it's just scraps, they'll take that. Or Estragon will. 41:05 Wes: Well, they're waiting, you know, they're desperate because their attention is on. They're in expectancy. Right. To use that word that Seneca uses, a state of expectancy. And the expectancy impoverishes the present and it leaves us with carrots and turnips and raw. 41:25 Erin: Oh, I like that. 41:26 Wes: Carrots and turnips. Yeah. And as opposed to something richer, you know, all the richness is put into the future. And people really do this with their lives. Obviously, they. They're holding out right for. For the big right for the prize that will only come if they. You know, it might be the asceticism of just working hard, but it. But. But sometimes it's just neglect, self neglect. Because, you know, one is focused on one's ambitions or some other form of salvation. It doesn't have to be ambition. 41:57 Erin: Drink the wine today, people. Eat the chicken today. 42:01 Wes: Carpe diem. Yeah. You know, I gave some classical quotes from Seneca about expectancy. 42:09 Erin: Is it Horace? It's not Horace, because that's. No, I think this seems too late. To be. 42:15 Wes: No, I think you're right. But my notes seized up. Yeah, it's Horace seized up. 42:23 Erin: Good one. 42:23 Wes: All right, so. Yeah. You want to give any final words, or is there nothing left to be done? 42:29 Erin: I was going to say, shall we go? 42:34 Wes: Yeah. 42:35 Erin: No. Used to say, yes, let's go. But then we're not gonna. But then there's gonna be five minutes. Five full minutes of just dead air, and then eventually it will end. 42:44 Wes: What are we waiting for if we can't go? We must be waiting for something. 42:52 Erin: Wake me up before you go. Go. 42:55 Wes: Yeah. All right. Thank you. 42:57 Erin: Thank you.

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Who is Godot? Whether God objet a or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation, even if they can't remember exactly what it is that needs saving. Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy, aspirational, libidinal, political or religious, insofar as they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible, except arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully. It was just an association. And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett. I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play? 1:51 Erin: I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class. It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam. And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett. 2:28 Wes: So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that? 2:33 Erin: I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett, and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward. Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play? Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam. Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it. And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to appreciate an adaptation of it. So the version available online from 2001 I find to have some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one. That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work. So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be. 4:00 Wes: Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. And was it BBC? Is that. 4:12 Erin: Yeah, I think so. 4:14 Wes: Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good. You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la. There's no video. 4:23 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I heard that. 4:25 Wes: But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting. 4:29 Erin: Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart? 4:33 Wes: No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at. I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play, which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right? And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with different emotions. You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true. Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice. Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen. It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play? 5:37 Erin: It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it. 5:43 Wes: It's like who's on first for the whole. 5:45 Erin: Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy. I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play. Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again. You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected. And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny. You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something. That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation. But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience, really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it. 6:48 Wes: Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up. Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you. The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse. Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a. It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness. Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right. So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element. But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory? 8:05 Erin: I hope not. I hate allegory. 8:08 Wes: Why do you hate allegory? 8:10 Erin: I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me. Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast. I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily. The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about? And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about? As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it. And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath. And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material. So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge. And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something. So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to me. And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical. But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio. If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest. 10:19 Wes: Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about. That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and. And so I'm. 10:32 Erin: But you don't do it in that way. 10:33 Wes: And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that. So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution of some unconscious intent or something, something like that. I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and. Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference. But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read. You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right? So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed to represent some conceptual level. So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer. It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place. So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play. He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're. You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind. So then. Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right? It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get. Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse. It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way. So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent? These are very suggestive names, right? Estragon is just French for. For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things. Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it. Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego. Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot. In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike. And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways. And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels. Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another. Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people. They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological functions. But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's. And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader. Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it? 14:58 Erin: I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be. I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college. And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory. I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols or its series. Right. 15:33 Wes: It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized. But you. 15:39 Erin: You know, the biblical allusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory. Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory. So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay or what have you. You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness, or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti. Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit. I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it. Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical. I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness. But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done. The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going. I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted into a film. Like the who's on first Routine. 17:50 Wes: Right. 17:50 Erin: If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine. So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less. I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind of nothingness. 19:04 Wes: The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play. Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after. It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it. He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say? Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled. Funny, Nothing to be done. And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part. Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set. So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming? I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer. What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Godot. God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation. They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God. But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved. I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears. Its course lies wholly toward the future. He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live. And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea. That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature. This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating what you have. So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on. I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all. All the same. What is it referring to? 21:51 Erin: Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness. I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose. So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward. So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way. Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of. And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation, their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that. 22:53 Wes: Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive, maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive. But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile. So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is. Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it. It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place. Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come. And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us. Right. Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next. And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Estragon will say, yeah, that's the idea. Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights. But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction. And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience. 25:26 Erin: You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to. The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation. Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know. I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me. 26:00 Wes: But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place. Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes. And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope. That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage. You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond. But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very local space and time. 26:39 Erin: Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things. But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play. And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater, Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way. So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated. You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical. Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there. But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it. Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously. It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position. So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being. I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing. Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be. The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that. Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it. 29:29 Wes: Ye. 29:30 Erin: So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done. It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play. And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it. And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning. 30:36 Wes: Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit. 30:40 Erin: Absolutely. 30:41 Wes: A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play. 30:45 Erin: But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning. So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more negative view of life. An idea of total negation that one would think would be suggested by some of this language. One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea of being nothing or of nothing being right. The play doesn't end in a death or anything like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time. Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent. They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead. Neither of them ends up saved either. 31:58 Wes: If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's something happening, so that there's some sort of action. And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right? With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to. That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right? You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up. And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it. Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Estragon says. Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing. He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for Godot. And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in. It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense, we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that. But none of that is ever going to be satisfied. 34:25 Erin: Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract, which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing. Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply. All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute. No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man. On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago. In the 90s. So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track. It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night. He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it. Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man. Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s. And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide. 36:29 Wes: Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up. 36:35 Erin: Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up. Yeah. 36:41 Wes: Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide. I think that seems to be the suggestion. 36:54 Erin: Oh, I see. No, interesting. 36:57 Wes: Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide. Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built? 37:13 Erin: Yeah, I think in the late 1880s. 37:16 Wes: We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get Macon. 37:24 Erin: Yeah, I never thought of that. 37:26 Wes: Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right. It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities. So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right. We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second. But the talk of Christ and all 37:56 Erin: that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way. So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but that they are in fact dead. 38:09 Wes: Or. What's the alternative reading of this? 38:13 Erin: We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point. So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since. So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness. 38:27 Wes: No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because. Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it. We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity. 38:42 Erin: Okay, Right. 38:44 Wes: Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it. 38:48 Erin: So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting. 38:50 Wes: But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what. To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too. Just kidding. 39:01 Erin: Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves. So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming. Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it. And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves. Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented. Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me. I'm not convinced by this part at all. The idea of repentance. I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway. Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible? I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels? Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy. Vladimir says, you should have been a poet. And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious? Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon. Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir. And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all. And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first. Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved story is not mentioned at all. So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of. An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that. 42:04 Wes: Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation. I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for. They'll be saved if only Godot comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right? Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable? Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually exist? Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst. Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible? Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true. I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right. It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something. I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right. And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak. But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right. So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst. And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right. His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever. Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just. As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet. I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to what it is that Estragon is saying. 44:23 Erin: You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely? 44:26 Wes: Yeah. 44:26 Erin: I think what Estragon says is really nice. 44:28 Wes: They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other. 44:32 Erin: Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but. 44:35 Wes: Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon. 44:40 Erin: Yeah. 44:41 Wes: Lovers. 44:42 Erin: One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence. But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other, which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy. 45:18 Wes: Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon. So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca. Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak, almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier. And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit. He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir. In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more. That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting. If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy. He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce. So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much. He's just being stuck in. Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon. 46:49 Erin: I think he. I'm just. I don't know. 46:51 Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but. 46:54 Erin: No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up. 46:58 Wes: I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually. But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned. Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious. So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship, but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out? Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer. Again, so it's not just allegory. They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own. They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place. Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters. So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past. We don't know what their jobs are. If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway. Tramps. 48:07 Erin: Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two. I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit. 48:33 Wes: Lucky and Pozzo. 48:34 Erin: Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right. 48:36 Wes: All right, thank you. 48:37 Erin: Thank you.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it. Upcoming Episodes: Waiting for Godot, The Mummy Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Withnail and I. We just got done discussing Danny and some of his commentary and the parallel between the end of the friendship between Withnail and Marwood and the end of the 60s thought we'd move on to the character of Monty and ultimately to a little bit what I want to discuss about romanticism and the urban versus the rural divide. But I thought maybe we should just start with Monty, since he's such a great character. They go, so Monty's with Nail's uncle and they go to his place to get the key to the cottage. Their solution? They're going to solve everything by going out into the country. Little do we know, but behind the scenes, Withnail has actually kind of sold marwood to the uncle, who's promised him some action if they can get the key, which sets up Monty's coming out to the countryside to intrude on them. Yeah, every scene with Monty in it is just fabulous. And some of the dialogue, his pomposity and then, as you mentioned before, double entendre. So, for instance, do you like vegetables? I've always been fond of root crops, but I only started to grow last summer. I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose. Withnail mentions geraniums. Monty says, little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts, prostitutes for the bees. There is, you will agree, a certain je ne sais quoi, something very special about a firm young carrot do help you anyway. 1:55 Erin: Yeah, what I love about his place is you look around the room and you realize that there's cauliflower in a vase rather than flowers, and then other vegetables are decorating the room in various places. 2:07 Wes: So. 2:07 Erin: Yeah, and it's very old fashioned English looking. So it sort of combines the brocade and the tapestries and the medieval looking England with gardening and having all these vegetables around and stuff. So he's sort of a synthesis of these wonderful English cultural touchstones in this one room. I think that when he says little traitors to Withnail's idea that he grows geraniums, I think he's calling Withnail a traitor for growing flowers. 2:39 Wes: Oh, I thought he was calling the geraniums traitors. 2:42 Erin: I wasn't sure about that. Yeah, the way that he said it, I thought it could be that. That they're traitors for growing geraniums. So there's something traitorous to one's sex about being interested in women. 2:54 Wes: Oh, yeah. 2:55 Erin: You know, that was the symbolic implication I took. 2:58 Wes: No, I think that's a good surmise. 3:01 Erin: One Withnail is going to be a pimp of Marwood just as he's a pimp, you know, over his geranium patch. Or whatever. But there's a lot about root vegetable. You know, I was thinking there's a lot about peeing in the film. There's a lot about time. We've covered all the. All the other drugs and stuff like that. But then there's a good bit about carrots. There will even be a marijuana carrot of sorts. Yeah. And he's cooking onions. He ends up killing the rats with onions. So more root vegetables. 3:29 Wes: Didn't think of that. Yeah. So when Monty comes out to the country, Right. So initially they hear him outside and they're afraid because they're worried about the poacher at this point, little do they know Monty is, at least for Marwood, the one that they should actually be afraid of. And then, of course, the, you know, they find out it's Monty ultimately. And then the next morning, our sense of what the cottage is, is transformed. I think it is almost like a rebirth because when they first get to the cottage, they've come from their squalid flat in London, Camden Town. And of course, they're telling everyone they're, you know, in the. And the boondocks that they're not. It's not the boondocks. That's not the right term for it. But anyway, in the countryside that they're not actually Londoners, so that they won't be hated for being Londoners. But what I think they would get, thought they would get out of that has turned out to be very disappointing. You get some scenes where Marwood can appreciate the countryside, but that's a very small part of it. They end up at a cottage that there's no heat and there's no water and they're burning fire furniture to get by and they don't have any food. And ultimately the farmer brings them a chicken they have to kill and then cook in the oven seated in a seated position. 4:48 Erin: But like unaccommodated man. 4:50 Wes: Yeah. 4:51 Erin: Poor bare forked animal. 4:54 Wes: Yeah. 4:55 Erin: This is. Again, they're a little shrunken down person. They can deal with it seems they could strangle a chicken. 5:01 Wes: Right. Although Withnail fantasizes about having shot it and then is very fond of the gun while they're there and they go out fishing to shoot fish. It sort of becomes a right. Survival's once again at stake. You get the sense in the beginning of the film it's desperate and their very survival is at stake because of the condition of the flat and the fact that they have no money. And then they get to the countryside and it's the same thing. Although the contrast with how things go once Monty's there. Making them breakfast in the morning gives you the impression that, okay, this is self imposed. They just bring the squalor and the deprivation with them. They're at a perfectly fine cottage. It is what it is. It's in the countryside. But the sense of it having been so dire is really about them. So in the morning, there's Monty making up a really nice breakfast. And they, of course, could have just gone, I guess, grocery shopping at any time. 6:00 Erin: Well, that's. That's the one thing. Yes, definitely, and certainly they could do much better. But I also wondered how much of it had to do with the lack of money and preparation, not understanding what was in the cottage or what wasn't in the cottage. Monty's come up with a bunch of things in the car, it seems, but, yeah, they're just. They're just sort of hopeless when Monty's there. Just immediately becomes really cozy and lovely and. Yeah. And I think there's something too, about. As I mentioned, Monty's apartment in London is. Or his house in London, I guess, is a fantasy of Englishness. And then they come up to the cottage and the cottage has portraits of George V and Mary of Teck on either side of the fireplace. So there's a. It's an older England that they've gone into. They go into the Crow and Crown, I think it is. It's the pub where they meet the. The poacher and the old English army man, who himself is, you know, very much a type similar to the. The guy I love in the Brendan Fraser Mummy, the 1999 mummy, which we should cover on the podcast at some point. It's one of my favorites. You know, the old guy, the old military man who's living out this fantasy, still believing that he's engaged in a war or something like that, who lies 7:12 Wes: about having been in the military. 7:14 Erin: Withnail with nail. Yeah. 7:16 Wes: And he says, oh, yeah, I could tell. And then, yeah. Asks where he's stationed. He's like, Ireland. He's like, oh, crack at the Mick. 7:24 Erin: Crack at the Mick. Which I take to be, you know, there's, you know, Withnail's stories, which he repeatedly invents, do show tremendous aptitude as an actor. He's always playing a role or putting on a kind of a disguise. But then also, the way that Withnail sort of advances the plot or the improvised plot twists that he comes up with do seem very associative. I took that to mean that he or I took the Ireland idea as being Adopted from the Irish guy that had confronted them in the pub in Camden. So that he's getting back at the Irish somehow by imagining this military past where he used to just. Right. So there's a wish fulfillment element to all of his little improvisations, no matter how ridiculous they are. He also says he's currently a journalist and that they're doing a story on the. On the town and small town life. 8:20 Wes: Right, right. 8:20 Erin: And then later he says that they're going to set a movie there, which is, you know, kind of more on the nose wish fulfillment. 8:26 Wes: But we are multi millionaires. 8:29 Erin: We're multimillionaires. Right. Which maybe Withnail is. He just can't access any of the money because his father's alive, withholding it from him. 8:38 Wes: Yeah. We get the sense that he's going to end up all right financially if he's still alive. And in a way, like his uncle. Right. His uncle had aspirations as well when younger and now he's fine, he's gotten his money from somewhere, but. 8:51 Erin: Yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah. So maybe Monty is more psychologically, perhaps, just as threatening to Withnail as to Marwood. Not quite, but almost. Oh, yeah. So in the crow and crown, there are pictures of Elizabeth and Philip on the walls and there's an image of her coronation garb. So that would be the 50s. It is like they've stepped back in time. So there's something. If they're flat is the 60s and they have to escape the flat in order to find someplace that hasn't been destroyed by them in some way. 9:24 Wes: And I think that's pre modern. Right. So this is part of the romanticism. It's modernity and the urban are alienated and I'm going to find less alienated situation in the countryside with the simple folk and in being connected to nature and in a way going back in time. Which sounds like the point you're trying to make. Yeah. 9:50 Erin: It's as if the fantasy of the 60s, we're sort of seeing the reality of it. I mean, it could be that this is representative of 69 and therefore the failure of the promise of the 60s. Or this flat represents the entire decade and the fact that it's actually been downhill from the social fabric. And yes, the sort of fanciful or the loose grip on reality that the military guy represents, but still functioning and connected to real life in terms of just active, practical things like farming. That the 60s are being represented maybe as some kind of aberration in all of this. 10:29 Wes: Well, I think that the countryside doesn't turn out to be such a great thing after all. And partly, as I mentioned, I think they bring their problems with them, of course, but also we get the sense that the natural, which is supposed to be better, turns out to have its own sinister undercurrents. So, right, the bull, there's the randy bull. So it's not all great being out there in nature. There's a sexual power to nature which can be persecutory. The natural is about what grows and ultimately about the sexual. Monty is interested in carrots not just because they represent penises and not just because he's obese and likes to eat, but. Right. He's interested in the romantic connection to nature, which is also a kind of connection to sex, I think. So they're going to be just as fearful of, say, the poacher, although he turns out to be more benevolent and initially afraid that the poacher is trying to break into the house and all that stuff. But what I'm trying to say is that. And in the figure of Monty himself, I think you get romanticism as representative as having the sinister exploitative undercurrent. So just to give an example of some of Monty's great speeches, where right in that breakfast in the morning, it seems like everything is now coming up roses. Everything is transformed. It feels like the vacation that they wanted might be coming together because they have a nice breakfast. But then we start to get Monty's stuff. He says the old order changeth, yielding place to new. And God fulfills himself in many ways. And soon, I suppose I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumor. Some vulgar little tumor. I love that. Oh, my boys, my boys. We're at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in, shat on by Tories, shoveled up by labor. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world. Sounds a little bit Matthew Arnold esque. 12:34 Erin: Let us be true to one another. 12:36 Wes: Right, Right. Yeah, exactly. And he's going to hit on Marwood. What else from the countryside? When they're walking in the countryside and he's talking about they do their thing where they want the finest wines known to humanity of a grapevine. So later at dinner, surrounded by trees in nature, one feels a glorious stirring of the senses, a rejection of the poisonous inhibition and a fecund motion of the soul. All the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. Because Marwood makes a comment about the fact that the squalidness of the cottage interferes with the pleasure. He's like all the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. When I was a lad, I'd rocket off on my tandem with Wrigglesworth and we'd just ride and ride and at night we'd find some barn and fall asleep with the perfumes of nature sighing on our skin. Yeah, just great, great stuff. But in the end, right, all of that, what does Monty represent? He's given up on ambition, he tells us, but he looks at it with a certain kind of nostalgia and resignation. He's nostalgic also about the loves of his youth and he's representative of what might happen to Withnail after giving up. But also I think he's representative of the sinister undercurrent of romanticism and the countryside, which is that it's not all just carrots and roses, carrots and geraniums. 14:08 Erin: It's also stick. 14:09 Wes: There's, you know, the natural world is dangerous, it's violent, it's driven by sexual instinct. All of that stuff comes out in Monty. 14:18 Erin: He's a bit sad, you know, the way that he leaves and all of that. I mean, he's been humiliated kind of because of Withnail. But, you know, when I say, let us be true to one another, he does have a kind of. His singular moral code seems to be faithfulness and so lets Marwood off the hook because he doesn't want Marwood to be unfaithful, untrue. 14:38 Wes: I mean, he does try to rape him, essentially, 14:44 Erin: but he has stopped. 14:45 Wes: I mean, he does have some burglary, 14:48 Erin: he does have some, some more than natural, you know, he has some guardrails. Yeah, I thought, I thought a little bit about, about the fact that they're in the Lake District and what role Capital R Romanticism is playing here. Because one would think that this is a place which historically, for the last couple hundred years anyway, hasn't been totally devoid of artistic types. You know, I love the moment when Withnail yells up at the sky in that kind of Caspar David Friedrich beautiful vista, where he says, I'm gonna be a star. So I don't know what to make of all of that or that, that particular moment where rather than appreciation of the grandeur of nature, he feels defiant and he's going to be part of the cosmos in a purely self serving way, which then the idea of a star comes back in the Hamlet soliloquy at the end of the film where it turns sour for him. But yeah, he has a delusion of grandeur in this moment. That he's going to get the better of all of these men who have been oppressing him, you know, as if, like, you could fight a bully with this idea that you're gonna be a famous actor. But, yeah, I don't know. I was trying to reconcile all of that, what Wordsworth and Coleridge have to do, maybe with Marwood and Withnail, if the two of them are like a degraded version of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who themselves were friends living in the Lake District, who ended up having, you know, sort of difficult at times, artistic relationship. The King Henry in Penrith is another great pub name that they go to. Another historical English emblem of masculinity. If it's Henry VIII or some other Henrys, but especially Henry vii, they've gone into town to buy Wellington's. But then, of course, they take the money and immediately squander it on booze, which seems, you know, really. They really seem beyond help to me in that moment because I realize they want to get away from Monty and just be without him for a while. But he has all that great wine back at the cottage, so why they would need to immediately squander this money on more booze is. It's a frustrating moment for me. So anyway, they go to this pub, the King Henry. They get kicked out. They go into the Penrith Tea Rooms. And then it's just old people. It's just all these old people that are having tea and want them out and they're trying to stay, saying that they're multi millionaires, that they're working on a film up here. The owner wants to call the police on them and says, we'll keep them here until they arrive. The police arrive. Marwood and Withnail just then just walk out. They just get away because they can't possibly be held back by these old guys. So Monty shows up in the. 17:38 Wes: In the car. 17:39 Erin: Yeah, in the Rolls, which, you know, maybe they are multi millionaires. Maybe you should have given them some cakes. 17:47 Wes: Withnail says, we'll be back. 17:49 Erin: Yeah. Have you been to the Lake District? 17:52 Wes: No. 17:53 Erin: I've been to some towns like this in England and in Scotland, and if you go into some of these places, there is. It is just like an older clientele. 18:01 Wes: Dodgy older. 18:03 Erin: They're great for that reason, but I never came roaring drunk into one, so I never had a bad time. 18:10 Wes: Have you ever gone roaring drunk into a stodgy establishment where you shouldn't be roaring drunk? 18:17 Erin: No. 18:18 Wes: Yeah. I can't remember if I. You know, I probably did, but I can't remember. 18:23 Erin: That's a great thing about these things. They take care of themselves. The embarrassment just goes away. 18:29 Wes: I know my friend Lebec and I used to quote that bring us the finest wines known to humanity. Frequently. 18:38 Erin: Yeah. And then this interesting thing with Monty happens where he admonishes Marwood, which I think must be for squandering the money, you know, it must have been. 18:49 Wes: Yeah. Monty's very upset with them. 18:51 Erin: Must be because they're so drunk. 18:52 Wes: Wellingtons and. Yeah, being drunk. 18:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Because they were going to tell him the story that. Oh, don't worry, we'll just tell him there was a farmer's conference and there was a run on these Wellingtons or something, so. So we couldn't buy them, so we had to squander the money. But I think when he picks them up, they must be so drunk and so out of it that he could tell what's really gone on. And so, yeah, so the suggestion is that Marwood is leading Withnail astray, which made me wonder if Withnail was leading Marwood astray throughout the film. He's certainly getting him into bad situations because of his big mouth. 19:23 Wes: I see Withnail as the bad, bad influence. 19:26 Erin: He's causing problems for Marwood. But is he actually. He's not successfully leading Marwood astray? I wouldn't say. 19:34 Wes: Well, Marwood says, what about the Wellingtons? And he says, bollocks to the Wellingtons. Right. So, yeah, there are many instances where Marwood is sort of. There's a bit of a survival instinct and you know, from the beginning of the movie to the end. And it's reflected in the fact that he actually gets an acting part. He's the one who comes to realization they can't keep going on this way. And he's going to go out and get tea. And there's a funny. When they get to the cottage, there's a funny point where he's like, okay, we're going to separate into fact finding groups. Groups of one. You'll deal with the water and I'll deal with the fire. Something like that at least has some interest in practical problems and in solving them. But yeah, he frequently just. It seemed to me he'll just do. He's very fearful. And that terror, as I mentioned, comes across from the very beginning of the movie. And you see it. It's a great comic effect in both the them. But like with the guy, the Irishman who calls them ponces, just the level of fear that Marwood gives off in the bathroom looking at the graffiti, worried about being raped ultimately. But, yeah, it seems to me he operates from the position of fear and is being carried along by Withnail's libertine, debauched attitude towards life, which is something Withnail can probably afford, as you mentioned, in the long run, more than he can from a financial perspective. He's got to do something, right? Withnail, in a way, can go on to be his uncle. Right? 21:13 Erin: Yeah. But I think there's something about Marwood which is really, despite Withnail getting him into scrapes and things, which is constitutionally impervious to Withnail. I mean, remarkably so. And maybe that is ultimately down to the class difference, too, that Marwood has to be more practical, has to be more scientific word he uses, or is more keyed into reality. The thing I really don't get about Marwood is why he smiles so much at Monty, which seems so unnecessary and needlessly encouraging from the beginning, when Monty is reaching around him to get into the bags. Why he doesn't just step away out of Monty's way instead of physically allowing himself to be put in this really compromising position is very. 21:59 Wes: Yeah, Withnail calls him out on this, right? 22:01 Erin: Oh, yes, yes. Yeah. 22:02 Wes: Marwood says, I got a cramp in the mouth from grinning. Stop smiling at him. I can't help it. I'm so uptight with him, I can't stop myself. But he does a lot of that. When the Irish guy comes up to them, I think they both give off. They do that smile of terror, like this terrified smile thing where they're just deer caught in the headlights and they don't know how to do anything but smile. 22:25 Erin: Well, Withnail's way of dealing with that kind of terror seems to be to out submissive himself out, you know, like he's going to go all the way in the submission direction and sort of fawn, like when he says he has a heart condition, you know, he's going to make himself into the wimpiest wimp in the world, you know, to try to get the guy to leave him alone. And then I think Marwood learns from that. He learned something about that tactic, maybe from Withnail, but one would think that he would be a better actor and he would understand. Obviously, Withnail has created a situation where Monty believes something about Marwood, which isn't true. And in the end, Monty's humiliation is all on Withnail's head. And yet, at the same time, Marwood has also been needlessly encouraging him with this, like, weird smiling throughout the entire every single one of his interactions with Monty. And he doesn't just step out of the way. He doesn't just act as though it would just be a normal thing to step out of the way. And so it's a little frustrating to see his resignation or passivity or when he's complaining about being too high and he gets kind of whiny. It's a moment where, again, I kind of break sympathy with Marwood. I think that for somebody who has gotten an acting part as a. No, I guess not as a soldier. That was the part that he originally went for, was the soldier, but instead he's gonna be the lead, which maybe is, you know, head soldier. But anyway, somebody who was able to successfully get this part, one would think that he would have a little more gumption, is what I'm trying to say. And yet ultimately his passivity doesn't stand in the way of him getting the part. 23:56 Wes: Well, it sounds like. I mean, he wasn't necessarily passive in that aspect of his life. From my point of view, I don't find either of them sympathetic except in a comedic sense throughout the movie. I'm not. They're both so absurdly terrified of everything and everything's an emergency, you know, running out of wine. You know, as Withnail says, we've got some very distressing news. We're out of wine. As he's pouring himself the last cup of wine. 24:26 Erin: Well, but Marwood is the one we're supposed to identify with to a certain extent. Right. We get his interiority. We. 24:31 Wes: Yeah, a bit more. But I think your point is well taken. It's kind of hard to. He's got some of the seeds of more of a more realistic orientation towards the world and towards a bit of a survival instinct and something that's working against self destructiveness. Right. Withnails is a force of pure destructiveness and self destructiveness. And Marwood seems to have been very induced by that and is almost as bad in many ways. Not as angry, not as envious and more passive than. Than Withnail, but in a similar psychologically abject state. Right. We don't see Marwood transformed as a character. We don't get to really see the arc. It all happens behind the scenes. He's planted the seeds with an audition, and in the end he gets the part and cuts his hair and leaves. And so that's the moment where he actually does something that's not completely passive. He's going to leave with nail and he's not going to even let him walk him all the way to the station. That's the first time I think he really genuinely asserts himself in the film. 25:41 Erin: I think there is a slight moment of transformation when Monty leaves and leaves that note for them and Marwood reads it and feels quite sorry for him. 25:50 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah. 25:51 Erin: He tells Withnail, you'll suffer for this. What you have done will have to be paid for. And then it is immediately paid for by the knock on the door, because it's the telegram telling him, Right. That he's gotten the part. 26:04 Wes: Good point. Yeah. When he tells off. Yeah, that's the big. 26:07 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 26:08 Wes: It's a big deal. When he really, really tells off Withnail. Yeah, that is a big change. 26:13 Erin: Yeah, you're right. Then he cuts his hair and refuses the drink, says that he doesn't have time. Right. This is another return to the time motif because Withnail has been driving furiously to get to London. He keeps saying that he's making time over and over again. Again, this idea that if he speeds in the car, you know, this connection to speeding. But of course, as always happens, you have to pay for it. Just like the description you read in part one of Marwood talking about speed, that eventually it catches up with you and seeps through your pores or something like that. In this, in the same way, Withnail is stopped by the police. And then ultimately, of course, getting arrested takes a lot more time, so you might as well have gone the speed limit or something. 26:57 Wes: Richard E. Grant had never. I don't know if he had never had a drink, but he had never been drunk and was a teetotaler. 27:03 Erin: Oh, no way. That's so funny. 27:06 Wes: Yeah, so Bruce Robinson, the director, writer and director of the movie, had him, insisted that he experienced being drunk. And so they got him very drunk until he vomited. You can see there's a little 20 minute documentary online if people want to look at it and see the actors talking about all of this. Yeah. So Robinson, in that documentary, talks about what a great job he thought that Grant did, pretending to be drunk and then pretending to be drunk, trying to pretend to not be drunk. Like when they get stopped by the cops. And he gives that look to the. Just the look on his face that he gives to the cops. And when he says, I've only had a few ales, they open the door and he practically falls out of the car because he's leaning so heavily in the door. So sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to put in that little tidbit about. And Richard E. Grant is so great in this. 27:55 Erin: Yeah, he Is. Yeah, yeah, he says, you know, Marwood says, I'll be late. You know, I have to go to the station. I'll be late. And Withnail says, there's always time for a drink. This is the final part of the film, and Marwood insists that he doesn't have time. So he's gotten out of the tractor beam of. Withnail squandering time or, you know, wasting time. He's been able to not. Not waste time anymore and get out of this cycle or whatever. And then with Nell, ends with a Hamlet soliloquy which begins, I have of late, but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth. So there's this idea of lateness and having run out of time inherent in the beginning of that speech. And then he talks about the roof fretted with golden fire and how that's all nothing, so that he seems to have lost his. This is almost like his parting speech where he, like Monty, knows that he will not play the Dane. And being a star, being the golden fire and the hanging firmament is not going to be possible for him or no longer meaningful to him. 28:54 Wes: It seems man delights not me. No, nor women neither. Nor women neither. Speaking to your point about the lack of women in the film and any romantic interests for that matter, I don't 29:06 Erin: mean to make too fine a point of that, but I think there's something really sinister about that. The lack of interest in women or discussion of women at all. 29:13 Wes: Well, it goes along with drinking lighter fluid. There's a whole collection of related sinister things. 29:20 Erin: Right. What goes along, too with, I think, creative stagnancy. I wanted to talk because him saying this speech, I guess, to the wolves reminds me of the various. Just of the names in the film. So we never get Marwood. Right. It's just on. I looked it up. How come the character's name is Marwood in this script that you sent me and it appears on a telegram. That's the only way that we know that his name is Marwood. 29:47 Wes: So the original screenplay has Marwood as the name, but I don't know if they put that in after the fact. But as you can buy it, like, if you buy the original screenplay, it'll say Marwood. It was on movies and materials related to the film during promotion. I don't know. But, yeah, it's purposefully. It doesn't come up in the movie. Is it really on the telegram? 30:08 Erin: I don't know. It just. That's what AI thinks. So take it, you know, for what it's worth. 30:14 Wes: Yeah, I think that might be a question. But anyway. Yeah. Purposefully. Right. Yeah. We don't. He's just I. Not Marwood. 30:21 Erin: Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because it is a. Like Withnail. You know, it's kind of a compound name. And so it got me thinking about names because the M is, you know, Withnail is, in a way, that upside down version of Marwood, just with the m and the W, I mean to say. And they're both. They're both compound words. 30:40 Wes: And then nail on wood and. 30:42 Erin: Yeah, right, right. Yes, that. And then also the farmer. Remember when they're trying to say, oh, don't you know, Montague Withnail, who lives in this cottage? And he's. He says, no, that guy. I think his name is French. And he calls him Adrian de la Touche, which is really, really good. But anyway, I looked up all of this because I was just interested in. So Montague means pointed mountain. And the transliteration, even in the closed caption on the Criterion Channel's version of Withnail and I, which is how I watched the movie, the transliteration of 31:21 Wes: Sisters with your captions. 31:23 Erin: No, no, I turned. No, I don't watch anything with closed caption. I turned it on to make sure that I got this right. And so he says, I. I seen a fat man, London type, queer sort. I think his name's French, or summit. And it transliterates his accent as S U M M I T. So his name is Montague. Right. Which means pointed mountain. And then the transliteration is Summit, which is really apt and then I looked up De la Touche. Touch. What would. What's that about? So it means of the touch and touch, or Touche means small patch of trees of the small wood or thicket. So Marwood and Adrian de la Touche. And, you know, there's some clever things going on with Marwood's relationship with Withnail and with Monty, even this imaginative name that the farmer has given Monty. It seems suggestive of what's going to happen, but only if you know what Marwood's name is. So it's kind of like a little in joke, maybe in the movie. Oh, and the other. Sorry. The reason why I brought this up is because Withnail is also experimenting with different stage names. 32:33 Wes: Oh, yeah. 32:34 Erin: He says at one point, he suggests that Desmond Wolf. And I thought that was indicative. Again, because there's so much symbolic masculinity going on in the various root vegetables and other things that Woolf was a desire to maybe put on A more. More masculine identity, more aggressive, perhaps. Marwood tells him it's too like Donald Wolfit, who was a famous English stage actor. And then later he suggests another name. So he seems to have borrowed Marwood's Donald and suggests Donald Twain. But then I just looked up, I was like, what's the origin of the name Donald? And it turns out that means world ruler, which, there's a lot to be said about that, that I prefer not to go go there. Who knew that Donald Duck, for instance, had to take one, had such a. An imposing meaning to his name. But, yeah, in the end, he's Desmond Wolf would be. Desmond Wolf is giving his soliloquy to the. The caged wolves in the zoo. 33:37 Wes: So in spite of all his rage, he's still just a Desmond Wolf in a cage. To almost quote one of my favorite songs. Are you Smashing Pumpkins fan? 33:49 Erin: I. I appreciate Smashing Pumpkins. I wouldn't call myself a fan. It's not really my cup of tea, but I've had a lot of people try to get me into it, so I've listened to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, but. 33:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Had to be able to embrace your melancholy side. 34:03 Erin: No, I do not by smashing any type of gourd, though, in my own ways. 34:11 Wes: What's the difference between a gourd and a root vegetable? 34:14 Erin: They don't grow underground. They grow on top of the ground. 34:18 Wes: Okay. All right. Well, on that note, that's a suitable place to end the well, to quote Withnail. We can't go on like this. We'll have to stop. So. 34:31 Erin: All right, thank you. Thank you.

It’s 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” There will, he says, be many refugees, and the film’s implication is that Withnail—who combines self-importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor—will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall, in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that, while they threaten to outcompete the world’s attention for the arts, ultimately can’t be used to excuse the pair’s failure to find work as actors. Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious: leaving bohemian pretensions behind—and along with them, as Marwood finds out in their jaunt to the countryside—a backward-looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Wes & Erin discuss the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it. Upcoming Episodes: Waiting for Godot, The Mummy Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: It's 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. There will, he says, be many refugees. And the film's implication is that Withnail, who combines self importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor, will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that while they threaten to out compete the world's attention for the arts, ultimately can't be used to excuse the pair's failure to find work as actors. Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious, leaving bohemian pretensions behind. And along with them, as Marwood finds out on their jaunt to the countryside, a backward looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis, but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Today we discuss the cult classic Withnail and I, and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin Olonick, and you're listening to Subtext. Okay, Erin, I didn't ask you before I suggested this movie whether you had seen it or not, and I was curious about whether you'd seen it and whether you liked it, but I thought I'd wait until the podcast to learn that. So, yeah. So what's the answer to that? 1:46 Erin: I was trying to figure out if I had seen it before and my memory. I don't think I'm making this up. I think I tried to watch it and got repulsed and stopped watching it because of the whole matter in the sink thing. But I really liked it and I thought it was hilarious. As long as you don't eat anything while you're watching it, I think it's okay. But the curve at the beginning was just getting over the few gross things going on, which all kind of happen at the beginning of the film. But did you see this, like, around the time that it came out, or what's your experience with it? 2:19 Wes: I saw this in the 90s. My friend John Lebec showed it to me. I think we should dedicate this episode to John Lebeck, who liked the character that Withnail is based on, passed away young, and I think in some ways there are situations. I lived with Lebeck and he was my best friend for a long time. There were times in my life where I think we didn't quite reach the level of Withnail and Marwood in terms of squalor and dissolution. But I think we were trying. We were trying to get there. And I think there's a kind of romance in that or there's a romanticization of that, and maybe that has something to do with its association with being a down and out artist. It's much more romantic if you can make the artist part of that work. But otherwise it just becomes, well, what is it they're feeling in the beginning of the movie? You know, terror, I think at least Mara would nail is more angry, I think. But anyway, this kind of story, yeah, it does have an appeal to me. I'm a big fan of Orwell's down and out in Paris and London, for instance. I don't know if you've read that there's another book called Keep the Aspidistras Flying by Orwell, which is the same sort of quality. The down and out story, it's not quite like this, but Bukowski, I think we talked about this before and you're not a fan, but his stories can be very much like this. They're autobiographical and it's about him being a boozer and trying to be a writer. 3:56 Erin: But. 3:56 Wes: Yeah, so I think part of the thing I was trying to think about rewatching this was. And it has been a long time, I think I saw it in the 90s and I saw it again at some point. I think this is the third time, but it's probably more than a decade since I've seen it. But I was trying to think, what is it that's so appealing about a story like this, if it is appealing to people? And then what is it that can appeal to people about putting themselves in this state, in this position? And then the larger question of how this is related to 60s counterculture, because, of course, it's set in 1969 and they've come to an end of an era. And the final stages of this relationship, I think, in a way are meant to represent the end of the 60s and everything, the good and bad of it. 4:44 Erin: Well, what I find appealing about it is just the dialogue. There are just so many funny lines. The hysterical moment where the police officer screams, get in the van. 4:54 Wes: Yeah. That is. 4:59 Erin: I had to pause it because I was laughing so hard. 5:02 Wes: Just completely loses it. 5:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 5:05 Wes: In the shrillest. Yeah, the shrillest possible voice. Completely loses control of himself. 5:13 Erin: Good cop, crazy cop or bad cop, crazy cop. I don't know what. What they're doing there, but for me, the film seemed to be less about this idea of what it means to be an artist per se, and instead this hopelessness about becoming a man, that there was no route to maturity, that the future had been foreclosed for Marwood and Withnail in some way. And I think their particular artistic endeavor. So acting is about that same process. It's also about adopting another identity. Of course, they're male actors, so it's a male identity putting on another man or another life or another role, and therefore, perhaps training oneself in what it means to be that other man or in what it means to be a man in general. And then that's played upon, it seems, with these gay jokes that pervade the film with the idea of being maybe subject to other men or under the influence of other men, or even this actorly idea of putting on another man becomes this kind of joke in which they're putting on Monty. Monty himself is a former actor, I suppose. I don't know. Maybe. As I say that, I'm thinking, well, that really is about the artist's life. What probably just characterizes it more than anything is that one is subject to outside approval regard. Very little is under one's control when one is an artist. So. But I was more interested in this idea of manhood, masculinity and feeling like everybody wants to, yeah, screw you over and what that might mean. And kind of turning that into a joke about all the meanings of that phrase, which I'm putting politely, more politely than the film does. 6:58 Wes: Yeah. I think there's something there about the way in which a certain kind of aesthetic relationship to the aesthetic and to artistic ambitions leaves one vulnerable. Right. They get called a ponce. That's a big deal. By the Irishman in the bar. What's the name of the pub again? 7:17 Erin: There are so many great pub names. There's the King Henry, the one with the two Cs. 7:23 Wes: It's the mother black cap. They're called ponces at that point. Jake the poacher says to Marwood that he's a prancing tit and that he wants working on. Although the poacher turns out to be a bit more benevolent than they thought and ends up bringing them a rabbit in the end. So there's a certain amount of paranoia. I mean, there's a lot of paranoia in this, but there's the realistic, what turns out to be persecution by Monty, or at least towards Marwood. Monty turns out, really is after him sexually, even if it's going to mean burglary, as he puts it, which is great. But I Think there's two components there. One is being a bit more upper class. And so being a ponce. That sort of slur is not just about sexuality, although it is. It's about being a limousine liberal. That's actually a very poor way to put it. Or maybe it's more after the times, actually, at least the times in which the movie was made, that sort of accusation. But it's about being effete and not manly. So I think that's the relationship. That's the sort of position that being actors puts them in. It's not a manly thing to do. It's more feminine. I think that's the idea. Part of the movie is about the dangers of the romanticization of that sort of aspiration. You know, when we see Monty in the countryside, he has all these romance, right. The countryside itself, when they take that trip, there's supposed to be something romantic about it, right. In the larger sense, it's getting into the countryside and into a rural scene. Wordsworth and Keats and all that. And Monty himself has all this flowery talk, but it's a cover up for lust. It's a cover up for sexual persecution. And that's what romanticization of this sort potentially opens you. Opens you up to. So I think you're right. Yeah, it's about. There's a lot about masculinity and homosexuality. And I'm relating it here to the larger idea of being a vulnerability created by a more aesthetic attitude rather than practical attitude towards the world. 9:44 Erin: Acting not being a manly thing is doubly implicated here, both because as an artist you're not working with your hands, but also the particular trappings of being an actor. Doing things like putting on makeup, which Monty does at one point. The idea of playing dress up and then this idea of adopting another man's identity somehow almost as if it's like a. I don't know. I was. I was trying to think through that a little bit, this marriage that happens as an actor when you're assuming someone else's identity. So you stay yourself or you're using your own body as the kind of the vessel for maybe another man's identity. And so there's something perhaps inherently homosexual about that. But I think in every single episode in this sort of episodic film, there is some anxiety about male rape or about being bested by a man or in one instance, a bull. In every single part of the film, it happens over and over again. And when they're not explicitly talking about that, it's displaced into carrots and meat and other symbolic terminology. But the movie also has. I mean, we get Dani as someone who's their age, but also predominantly, they're just interacting with older men. Also the farmer. The farmer is sort of more closer to their age than some of the other men in the film, but predominantly they're interacting with older men when they're not interacting with, you know, the Irish guy at the pub or the poacher, like these bigger, scarier, more obviously manly type of guys. And there are no women in the film of their own age whatsoever, which is one of the first things I notice. They yell at those schoolgirls with. With Nell, yells at the schoolgirls out the window, scrubbers. Other than that, you don't see any women of their. I mean, not including that, you don't see any women of their generation. You only see those schoolgirls and then the older women, like, in the tea rooms in Penrith and the farmer's mother. So it's a world devoid of women and they're just really, really scared of the advances of men. And then in the cafe with the first scene where Marwood puts the kettle on and then goes down to the cafe, he's looking at the headlines in the newspaper and the first headline we see is, moment of fulfillment for local boy who became a woman. You know, the pipeline is boy to woman, nude. It's not boy to man. Right. There's no. This is the. This seems to be the crisis. How do you grow up and become. How do you become a man? Is the central idea, maybe, that Marwood and Withnail are struggling with. Are you. You can't really become a Monty. Monty has a whole history of montiness that obviously Marwood and Withnail don't share. You can't become the old drunk military man in the pub, and they're not capable of becoming Jeff Woad or the poacher or the big burly Irish guy. What is their route to manhood? Which is a weird thing because they both look old to be thinking about that, but whatever. 12:56 Wes: Yeah. Well, I want to focus a little bit on this news theme because I think it's the way the film starts and there's a relationship here to art as well, insofar as the news is what competes for attention with the aesthetic from others. People who are reading newspapers are not reading books. And in particular, it has to do with this salacious news. Right. So there's the woman becoming a man. Then there's the nude au pair's secret life. That's another headline These are real headlines apparently from the time and the way Marwood narrates this. And this is one of the great. There's just so much great dialogue, as you said, and some great voiceover as well. He says 13 million Londoners have to wake up to this. The murder and Albran and rape. And I'm sitting in this bloody shack and I can't cope with Withnail. I must be out of my mind. I must go home at once and discuss these problems and discuss his problems in depth. I thought it was these problems. It's written here as his discuss his problems in depth. When he gets home, Withnail is reading the news. And let's see, Curse of the Superman. Yeah, before that. There's just so many great lines in this I hate to skip over, but my thumbs have gone weird. I'm in the middle of a bloody overdose. I feel really dreadful. And then with nails, so do I. So does everyone. Look at my tongue. Gray yellow sock. And then goes on to talk about this curse of the supermen. People taking steroids to win competitions. Athletes like Jeff Woad. So in a world exclusive interview, 33 year old shot putter Jeff Woad, who weighs 317 pounds, admitted taking massive doses of anabolic steroids, drugs banned in sport. He used to get in bad tempers, says his wife. He used to pick on me, but now he's stopped. He's much better. In our sex life and in our general, the sex life of course comes first. And then, Jesus Christ. This huge thatch headed, this huge thatched head with its earlobes and cannonballs is now considered sane. And then Marwa would saying, please, I don't feel good with nail. That's what you'd say. But that wouldn't wash with Jeff. No. He'd like a bit of pleading add spice to it. In fact, he'd probably tell you that he was going to do what he was going to do before he did it. I'm going to pull your head off. No, please don't pull my head off. I'm going to pull your head off because I don't like your head. As you mentioned, this sort of paranoia about it's not just about sexual assault but it's about violence in general towards other men. Comes up quite a bit and this is just one of the instances of it. But it's connected here to this idea of the salacious events of the world. And so I guess I'm trying to draw a parallel. I'm trying to draw a connection here between the idea that being an artist makes you vulnerable to not just criticism, but to violence of some sort. And then the other idea here is that news of the salacious events of the world like this, in a way, is competition for attention. And so there's the potential to write. The real vulnerability for the artist is criticism from an audience or the disinterest, lack of interest from an audience. So that's also the kind of threat 16:34 Erin: that's being described here in this Jeff Wode instance. There's the idea too that you have to be a superman to get ahead. You have to be more than human somehow in order to achieve any kind of success in this world. And also inherent in that is this idea that you have to cheat because he's taking these, these steroids. But he's also already this huge guy, Withnail points out. Imagine the size of his balls. So there's always this, you know, imagine getting into a fight with him and that's then when he says, you know, he sort of does the imaginary dialogue. But this idea of sexual prowess is repeatedly linked with being superhuman somehow, or gargantuan. And Withnail and Marwood are kind of on the losing end of that. It occurs to me that even the poacher has a moment of being literally superhuman when he's, when he's pulling, you know, he pulls the eel out of his pants. And then he also has. He looks bigger than he is because it turns out he has, underneath his jacket, he's being sort of puffed up with the pheasants. It's almost like he has these prostheses that are making him more than human, more than just a normal man. And I. You know what's interesting too, in this, in the scene looking around the flat, they have these kind of Georgian style paintings on the walls. They almost look like Romneys. When Withnail is talking about the imaginary conversation with Jeff Woad, he walks over to the mirror and you see there's an illustration of kind of a medieval king sitting on the mantel that's sort of propped up against the mirror. And then there are also postcards of what look like palaces, probably. And it occurs to me that, you know, as you point out, this is also an anxiety of class. Oddly that though Withnail, not Marwood, I suppose, but though Withnail is upper class, that somehow leaves him vulnerable to the more vital, you know, working class men that could beat him up. And come to think of it, the king as an image of that is. Is also really interesting. This model of this medieval king with a Long sword. You have to be. You have to be at the top of the heap. Right. You have to be the king among aristocrats and therefore superhuman in that kind of way, almost to escape being seen as a feat somehow. 18:51 Wes: Yeah. So I sent you a kind of transcript of the movie, including some scene descriptions. And I don't know who did that. It's of the movie as shot and the original screenplay, as always, is different. But there's a lot of great writing in the original screenplay that doesn't make it into the transcript that we have and can't even be shot. So, for instance, despite the squalor, the room is furnished with antiques, heirlooms and other quality stuff. An indescribable melange of stuff crowds a low table. A large Victorian globe of the world soars above bacon rinds. So, okay, so all this stuff can be shot. I don't remember the bacon rinds. But anyway, objet d' art and breakfast remains compete for space. Then he says Dostoevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. That's the part that can't be shot. 19:46 Erin: That's in the scene description. 19:48 Wes: That's in the. Yeah. So he put it in there knowing, of course, this is supposed to not. You're. If you read a screenplay book, they told. Tell you you're never supposed to write stuff like that. That belongs in a novel. Right. It can't be shot, so it doesn't belong in there. But of course he put it in. 20:03 Erin: Well, it's conveys something to the scene dressers. 20:10 Wes: Yeah. He was also a novelist. Bruce Robinson, the writer and the director. And he was nominated for an Academy Award for adapting the Killing Fields. He wrote and directed how to Get Ahead in Advertising. Have you seen that? 20:25 Erin: I haven't seen it. I've seen the Killing Fields. 20:27 Wes: He worked with Truffaut as an actor. He was also an actor. He was in Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director. And part of this movie is based on that because apparently Zeffirelli sexually harassed him on set. I think we were forced to watch that Romeo and Juliet version in high school. 20:48 Erin: Everybody. 20:48 Wes: Yeah. Despite a mysterious topless scene. Yeah, well, Juliet gets topless. Right. It's like the weirdest thing. 20:55 Erin: Stories of, like, teachers just standing in front of the television screen during that. I think that's kind of a universal experience where they, you know, they like. It happens, whatever. Or you get somebody standing in front to try to block the screen for a minute. 21:13 Wes: A Lot is based on his personal life, as I've already mentioned. He really did have a roommate, much like with nail, who did drink lighter fluid at some point. And he said he's basically compressed what went on for two years into a couple of weeks. But I mention all this just because I think you've gotten that the sense in which the talk about Superman has something to do with the idea that they have to be supermen in order to get ahead. I forget how you put it. But in any case, part of this is about ambition. They, like Jeff Woad, are on drugs and they in a sense are pushing themselves to the limit to see the limits of human performance. There's something the Olympics being a bum. 22:03 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That hadn't occurred to me, oddly enough. 22:08 Wes: And once again the news is directly competition. So Withnail says at one point where he says, you've had an audition. Why can't I have an audition? This is a recurring theme with him. He's always envious, you have soup. Where's my soup? Turns out to be coffee that, that Marwood is eating with a spoon. In any case, he'll end up saying, the only program I'm likely to get on is the fucking news. So this is another point where we get this implied competition with salacious events of the world and with these manly supermen who are nevertheless cheating. So how are you going to get ahead under those circumstances? When I was going over my, you know, after, after watching it again and going over the transcript, I thought, yeah, it's really. There's a really interesting feeling of complete desperation and paranoia and imminent catastrophe, like the world is going to end. Which again I think, you know, part of that's meant to capture the end of the 60s, but it's really about ambition. I think, you know, they complain a lot in the movie about where they are with their careers not getting parts and you know, their trying to be actors. But you get the sense that this is kind of a portrait of ambition itself. Regardless of how one is actually doing in the real world with one's aspirations, there's a kind of desperation and potential internal psychological squalor that can crop up in relationship to one's ambitious ideals. Right. So you might neglect yourself and everything practical in life in order to, right, devote yourself to being an actor or an artist or intellectual or something like that. More generally we might neglect our well being in the service of some grandiose self conception of ourself unrealistic aspirations. So the drug addled squalor that they're in is kind of an extreme case of that. But it's sort of. One could take it as representing this real bifurcation that happens within people, even within a psyche between an abject shadow self, as Jung would put it, and more grandiose, manic self related to the idea of the powerful great person that one might be. Or if you're completely psychotic, that you think you are godlike. Yeah. 24:47 Erin: They're taking drugs puts them in something of that kind of position perhaps. Right. Because there's the repeated idea of time in the film and that they're toying with time by taking these drugs that they can throw away a day if they want to. Right. Doesn't Marwood say that at some point we'll go, we'll have a drink and then we'll take some drug. I can't remember what it is. Some kind of antidepressant maybe. 25:12 Wes: Let me read this. It's about Marwoods doing a voiceover. Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change, you lose, you gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills. But sooner or later you got to get out because it's crashing. And all at once those frozen hours melt through the nervous system and seep out the pores. Is that what you're thinking of? Such a great. 25:36 Erin: I was thinking of that. But as at a contrast to this moment, which I think I found. It's actually Withnail who says it. This is the plan. We'll get in there. This is when they're about to go into the mother black cap. We'll get in there and get wrecked. Then we'll eat a pork pie. Then we'll drop a couple of Sermontill 50s each. Means we'll miss out on Monday but come up smiling Tuesday morning. So they're planning on missing a day and just being. I think that's. That's what's going on there. That they're just going to be blacked out for a day. So there's the speeding up. Slow. 26:07 Wes: Hear about the drinking game associated with. 26:09 Erin: Yes, I did. Yeah. That's like the number one thing that came up on the search for. With nail and eye Lord try to 26:15 Wes: match with Withnail drink for drink. And at one point he orders. What is it? A quadruple whiskey and a pint or something anyway. 26:24 Erin: Right? 26:24 Wes: Yeah. You kill yourself if you really try to do it. 26:26 Erin: Yeah. But this. 26:27 Wes: Sorry. 26:28 Erin: Yeah. This. This idea of. You know. I think part of what you're suggesting about the news also. Also gets at this, right. There's a finite economy of time and attention, and. And you're trying to take a piece of that. And it occurs to me, too, that actors are among the unluckiest artists in that when you're not acting, you really do have nothing to do. You're just killing time between parts. It's not like if you're not being published or you're not getting your painting sold, that you, you know, your paintbrush is taken away from you. You could still keep working. I mean, it's difficult to do because it's difficult to work, you know, when your ego is being destroyed by not getting any kind of recognition whatsoever. But you can technically still keep going and keep working. But if you're not being cast in something, then you just. You can't do anything at all. And so this feeling of things being. I think you said there's a sense of dread hanging over the film and things kind of being over, or the idea that they're running out of time and the suggestion that it's because of the end of the 60s. I think that's true. But there's also the fact that the friendship is over. Right. Like, before the movie even starts, the friendship has basically ended. Because it seems like the dread from Withnail anyway is about knowing somehow that this audition is going to bear fruit for Marwood in some way, and so that has already caused the rift. 27:54 Wes: Did you sense that before the end of the movie? Cause I didn't. Yeah, I wasn't paying enough attention. So the ending caught me unawares, I guess. Yeah. 28:05 Erin: I think this is the tension between them from the beginning and the idea that Marwood is trying to establish sympathy or a connection between them by saying, we're in the same boat. And Withnail rejects that repeatedly. It's not just because Withnail's an egomaniac, though he is, and feels uniquely that he's suffering uniquely and. And uniquely entitled, though he does feel that way. It's also, I think, that he sees the writing on the wall, so he knows that Morwood is going to succeed and is on the way to some sort of success. I think that's part of it. It's like they start a clock on the end of the friendship, starting from the beginning of the movie. And. Oh, and there's also the fact that withnail is turning 30. There's the suggestion that one only has enough time to play Hamlet. Right. And Hamlet is, of course, about. Partially about dithering and wasting time and not dealing with time the way one should. And Monty says there comes a time when you realize you're never going to play the Dane. 29:07 Wes: Do you mind if I read it? 29:08 Erin: Please. 29:09 Wes: It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play the Dane. When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases. Don't you agree? It's a part I intend to play, Uncle. Which, of course, he does at the very end of the film when he does that speech. But that's a really good. I didn't think about that. Yeah. The relationship to time and dithering and even the irony of Monty saying you wake up and realize you're out of time to play Hamlet. 29:44 Erin: So, yeah, what does that mean? You're never going to get the opportunity, or you've aged out, or both. But really it means both. And with nail is turning 30. When you're far away from somebody up on a stage, you can get away with being a lot older than the part that you're playing. So presumably With Nail does have maybe 10, if not 15, if not 20 more years to play Hamlet, depending on how ridiculous the casting director is. But spiritually, maybe. 30:12 Wes: How old was Branagh when he played Hamlet? 30:15 Erin: Too old. 30:16 Wes: Seemed a bit too old. Yeah. 30:18 Erin: Yeah. Everybody who plays it on. On screen, you know, they. They've established themselves in it, which means they've been playing it for a long time, and by the time the screen adaptation comes up. So there's this idea that you could play with time. You could play with time when you're young and taking all these drugs and drinking all this, all these tremendous quantities seems to go hand in hand with this idea of youth. And youth seems to be something that you have to inherently squander. Something of that, I don't know, quality goes on in youth or is essential to youth that you're squandering it. And the 60s and youth culture and all of that is also running out. So I think, as Danny says, at some point they have to come down from the. From their trip with the end of the decade, and it's over now because they're selling hippie wigs at Woolworths, you know, so there's been some sort of. Some frozen in amber quality that's happening to the 60s, where it's possible to buy the trappings of the decade now in a store almost as a kind of costume, as a Halloween costume, or maybe as a, you know, a costume for an actor to then play the part of the 60s hippie. 31:27 Wes: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about Danny and then this connection that he makes between the end of the friendship and the end of the 60s. Right. So Danny is there. Maybe let's talk about the connection first, and then we'll get more into Dany's character, which is great. So Danny says to Marwood, you got the pirate man? Marwood says, I got a different one. They want me to play the lead. And then Withnail says, congratulations. And then they move on, or Dany moves on. Where exactly have you two been? Marwood Holliday, in the countryside. We don't know at this point that Danny is going to now eulogize the decade, but it's also, of course, a eulogy for the friendship. So Danny says, that's a very good idea. London is a country coming down from its trip. We are 91 days from the end of this decade, and there's going to be a lot of refugees. So of course, Withnail is one of those who's going to get left behind. Not everyone's going to be able to make the transition from. How do you characterize the 60s counterculture and youth culture and the kinds of aspirations it represented? And with, I would say, libertinism, sex, drugs and rock and roll and all that stuff. And in the end, the promise of all that didn't really pan out. And it's a sad moment. Right. Likewise, the end of the friendship of Withnail and Marwood is sad. And those two forms of sadness get connected. Anyway, Danny continues, they'll be going around this town shouting, bring out your dead. Reference to Monty Python. In fact, it's a reference to Monty Python, but It's set in 1969, before the Holy Grail movie was, in any case. Yeah. So going around this town shouting, bring out your dead. Which, of course, is where Withnail is at this point. And then they learn that they're going to be evicted. And it's partly because of what Danny's done with the landlord. Some bald geezer starts coming on really bald with me, it's a callback to the beginning of the film where he has a theory of baldness and uptightness. Is that it for Danny's eulogy? That and the idea when Marwood says he's not going to smoke any more grass, Danny says, that is an unfortunate political decision reflecting these times. And then finally Withnail says, what are you talking about, Danny? And Danny says, politics, man. If you're hanging onto a rising balloon, you're presented with a difficult decision. Let's go before it's too late. Or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question, how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They're selling hippie wigs and Woolworths men. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black. 34:20 Erin: I was having trouble reconciling Danny's hatred of bald men with his hatred of wigs. But I guess they're one and the same. You gotta just grow your own hair. 34:30 Wes: Yeah. What does he say about it? It's like the. Let's see. I don't advise a haircut man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald headed men are uptight. It's funny too, because Robinson based this character actually off a hairdresser. His hairdresser. Yeah. 34:53 Erin: When he calls a judge's wig a far out looking hat and when Withnail tells him it's a wig, he's like, no, no, this was more like a long white hat. It's like, yeah, it does look kind of weird. 35:05 Wes: It's a story about the coal man is what he calls him. Yeah. Where he goes to court and he's wearing. He has a fancy get up and then. Yeah, but that. Yeah, that's a good point. Calling the. Yeah. Not realizing that the judge's wig is actually a wig. But yeah, I just also too wanted to say a bit about Danny because in a way he's representative of. 35:28 Erin: He's a real hippie. 35:29 Wes: Yeah. But he's kind of a sage of sorts or a drug guru. The idea that somehow drugs can enlighten you, which I guess is, you know, it's an idea very much associated with the 60s and give you some special sort of wisdom. But of course, in his character he just comes across the way he's delivering his lines, which are just slow and it's obviously high. He's drug addled. But there's also supposed to be something sage about him. And he has a lot of other great lines of his own. Like St. Peter preached the epistles to the apostles looking like that. Referring to Marwood's not having any clothes on. There are various points where he's acting in a sage like manner, like saying he doesn't advise. Right. When he. That quote I just read about not advising a haircut or his theory of bald men. And then the kind of precision that he uses when he talks about drugs. So, for instance, when he gets in this fight, this fight with Withnail, and says, don't get uptight with me, man, because if you do, I'll have to give you a dose of medicine. And if I spike you, you'll know you've been spoken to. If I'd medicine you, you'd think a brain tumor was a birthday present. And then ultimately challenging Withnail to take this drug, which he calls phenodehydrochloride Benzorax, which I looked up and is not real street named him the embalmer. And then later on, Marwood says, give me some Valium, I'm getting the fear. And he says, you've done something to your brain. You've made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, you'll do something else to your brain. You will make it low. Why trust one drug and not the other? That's politics, isn't it? So all these kind of sage sounding. On the one hand, he's so laid back, it's like Daoism. Yeah, he's a slacker. On the other hand, there's this precision. Talks about the law, gives advice, uses technical name for drugs. It's this interesting synthesis, this interesting combination of those two trends. So I thought. I just wanted to point that out about Danny because he's such a great character. 37:50 Erin: He's also emblematic of the boy at the same time that he is a sage, this sort of 60s youth who. I mean, he does have a lot of pretty insightful things to say sometimes, but he keeps himself in a state of suspended animation almost with these. With these drugs. Like, he talks about retiring and going into business, which I really love that, that phrase, which is paradoxical or. Or eboric or something. And Withnail says, I thought you were in the bottle industry. Which is great because there's this idea that he's going to retire from the drug business, which is he's going to put away childish things like being in the bottle industry, which obviously there's this suggestion of. Of the baby bottle inherent in selling. Whatever. Selling prescription drugs out of bottles or selling contraptions to get yourself out of drunk driving charges by keeping pee in a bottle or. Right. Whatever. Whatever it is that he's involved in. And that. That kind of confusion also comes up later when he talks about papers. And he had just been talking about rolling a joint. So he has joint papers. But then he really is talking about the eviction notice. So there's a kind of double Meaning there. But anyway, he says, no, I'm gonna go into the toy. The toy industry. That's the grown up thing he's going 39:07 Wes: to do with a doll that craps itself. Yeah, yeah, great point. 39:11 Erin: The toy idea is really rich. I mean, there is a. There's a lot in the. In the movie about peeing oddly things. Things happen when people pee first. There's this idea, you know, he also has a voodoo some point that its head comes off and it has pills in it. There's this idea of Marwood and Withnail and Dany of only able to. Only being able to deal with things that are smaller than themselves. Right? So when they're going to fight the rat and they get all charged up about fighting the rat, they have this vigor about that because they're about to confront something that's smaller than them rather than repeatedly encountering, as they do, men who are bigger than them who might fight them. So there, there's this sort of, you know, Russian doll quality where you're picking on whatever is smaller than you. And so this interest in dolls and the shrunken down thing seems to be related to powerlessness and needing to deal with something smaller than oneself. Also there's this really interesting sort of gendered quality to this too because he says, like, oh, little girls love these dolls. They can take care of these things. They can clean up after the messes that these dolls make and they even enjoy it, Right. 40:23 Wes: If they like dolls that pee themselves, how much more are they going to like dolls that crap themselves? 40:30 Erin: Right, Right. But also, Marwood and Withnail have made just a disgusting. Just a shithole of their, of their flat. Right? And they are incapable, it seems, of cleaning up after themselves. And the women that are missing from the movie, is it their job to clean up after these men that are like children that can't clean up after themselves? You know, there's. There's something. Is this a message about why women are missing from the film or what. What role women would be playing in their lives if they had women? Or. I don't know, it's. 41:01 Wes: Would their flat be cleaner if they had girlfriends? 41:04 Erin: Yes, of course. Yeah. I mean, and they would be. And not only because the women are cleaning up after them, but because they would have to. They would, yes, clean up for the sake of the women. Right? 41:13 Wes: They would. They would have to. 41:14 Erin: So, yeah, so there's something. He's not thinking about women his own. Even Danny, right, isn't thinking about women his own age. He's thinking about these little Girls and giving them dolls almost in the interest of training them to grow up to clean after people like that, you know what I mean? Like, there's a strange hole at the center of the film where age appropriate women should be. And everything is geared in one to one extreme or the other. Children or elderly people, or people at least like Monty, a generation older than they are. So in other words, Dany is a sage, but he's also just as stunted as Marwood and Withnail in certain ways. 41:53 Wes: Don't get me wrong, Robinson based him on a hairdresser that he thought of as a complete idiot. 41:58 Erin: Yeah. No, I love Danny. 42:01 Wes: I mean, he's such a great character, but even the way he speaks supposedly is. Right. That's Robinson's direction to the actor who plays Danny to emulate that speech. Exactly. And the slowness of it and the accent and everything. 42:15 Erin: Well, he manages a lot of syllables. 42:18 Wes: Yeah. Seems like it became sort of a trope. Right. I've seen this character now many times in movies, Right. The idiot sage drug addict who's somehow precise and knowledgeable and yet drug addled and idiotic at the same time. 42:39 Erin: I was thinking of this even with Monty, his speech about being a boy and on the tandem bike with his little school chum. I was thinking that. Oh, the character of Gil Chesterton, I think is his name in Frasier. The gourmand who has the cooking or the restaurant review show. And he's always talking about romping with his school chums in Surrey or whatever. 43:02 Wes: Oh, that's funny. 43:03 Erin: That character probably was. You know, couldn't exist without Monty. 43:08 Wes: Well, let's talk about Monty for the second half. 43:11 Erin: Sure. 43:12 Wes: For the first part of the second half. And then you. I think we could use him as a segue into this theme that I raised about city, you know, the urban versus the rural and the romance of going into the countryside and the way that doesn't actually pan out for them. So, yeah, we'll talk about in part two. So we've reached the end of part one. patreon.com subtextpodcast or directly on Apple. If not, you can wait a week for part two. All right, thank you. 43:52 Erin: Thank you.

Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography. We're covering In Plato's Cave and America Seen Through Photographs Darkly, which I've been bringing in a little bit primarily, but we've just been talking about In Plato's Cave. And I want to continue talking about the implied ethics, I want to call it, of Sontag's critique of photography by speaking of the ways in which photographs inure us. I think Sontag is very subtly setting up a shadow of that in which she's implying that there might be a different relationship to photography which we could somehow inculcate in ourselves. I wonder if we can use this essay, in other words, to spin out some theories about what Sontag would say is a more ethical relationship to the photographic image. I think there's a suggestion in a couple of places what that might be. Well, she has this idea, as we've already covered, that there is something aggressive and therefore imperialistic about photography, and also that it flattens and democratizes the world at the same time. And therefore, in a strange sort of way, I think her middle Ground, or what she might be very subtly advocating for, is a kind of aristocracy of images. A word which I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable using. And I don't want to put words in her mouth, but a curation of images which suggests a kind of hierarchical relationship. So the place that I'm getting this. And you'll tell me if I'm crazy for drawing this conclusion, but the place that I'm getting this is when she talks about. Photographs are themselves packaged. They're a way of packaging the world, and they somehow invite packaging. And then she talks about a photograph working well in a book. Because unlike a painting, which is not smooth and not printed out, a photograph already is smooth and printed. So when it's reproduced in a book, it keeps much of its essential quality. And she says, but still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme. For putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging and enlarging still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed. And there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. So that's where. That's where I'm getting this curation scheme from. You have a bunch of photographs in a book. You might open it up and flip through, and you're almost, you know, your eyes are kind of glazing over. You're not really looking at anything. You're not giving an equal amount of time to distinct images. And so she's implying that when photographs are in a film in which each photograph is given a set amount of time by some. Some director or some curator of these images who's forcing you to look at just say one photo for 15 seconds and then the next photo for 20 seconds. That this creates a different kind of relationship to the image and the person who is making this film. Curating this selection, determining the order, determining the amount of time allotted to each individual photograph is doing you a service, it seems. That's kind of what she's implying about this Chris Marker film, in which there's an imposed order. And she says, as a result, a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. So to me, that implies that there is a better way to consume images. And that is by having someone who presumably knows More than we do curating that experience of images. For us, there might be some sort of curatorial relationship which is better than our current democratized, willy nilly relationship with images. Do you see where I'm getting this aristocratic. 4:24 Wes: Yeah. So there's not a lot in this essay that's positive. You know, we'll get to the way it concludes in a second. Which seems pretty globally negative. I mean, right? There are hints of the positive when she says, for instance, that after looking at Holocaust photos, I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten. Something went dead, something is still crying. So that's actually just a mixed picture right there. Grief, I think, would be a positive effect and would serve the ethical. Right. So one question is, to what extent can photography serve the political and the ethical? To what extent can it arouse conscience? And then to what extent does it arouse all these other feelings, like manic defenses in the sense of possessing the world and that other stuff? And the point that you're focusing on, which I think is early on in the essay. Right. Gets at the fact that a more curated relationship to images could have a more positive effect. And then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what kinds of effects are we thinking of? Are we thinking of the aesthetic, the moral, the political? Do we need them to be sequenced for us and into film form? Or is it enough to be in a museum and to have photographs by great artists? Of course, she's going to have quite an interesting critique of Diane Arbus in the next essay, and I've only read the first two essays of this book. So given that you've read the whole book, is there a more expansive, positive picture that she gives for photography? 6:02 Erin: Okay, no. And I think that's why I'm interested in trying to find the flip side of this critique. It might be that it simply just opens up a whole other can of worms, like who gets to curate? Who decides? Is it simply that there is some aristocracy of artists implied by this, say, this film director who's curated these images and set times for them? She finds this effective. So is it that artists are the ones who can curate these for us? Well, not really, because then she also has Arbus as an artist photographer. She's selecting subjects and choosing what to photograph. And Sontag has problems, as do I, with some of those selections. So I've set a sort of impossible task for us, which is to try and figure out what Sontag might have said or might be saying in some sort of shadow, of this essay, about what a positive relationship to photographs might be. Yeah, so it's all speculative, but there is an idea of refusal as well, of refusal of looking or a refusal to inure ourselves, which seems implicit in the. At the end of Plato's Cave and the discussion of understanding, the way the 7:14 Wes: essay wraps up, which is actually quite negative. She makes a few different negative points about photography. One is so on my page 16, she'll say the ethical content of photographs is fragile. And they're fragile because the pathos of pastness kind of swallows them up. She'll say the particular qualities and intentions of the photographs tend to be swallowed up in the general pathos of time past. So whether it's a photograph from 1900 that might have had some emotional effect back then to us, just might look old timey. And the old timeiness of it is more interesting to us than whatever pathos is there in the subject matter of the picture. And then she gets into the sort of incorporation of photography into institutions of control, like with the police, for instance, or bureaucracy. We photograph, we have to have a photographic id. And despite all that, she'll say there's an informational value to pictures in those bureaucratic contexts. But for most people, she'll say the informational value of pictures is on the same order as that of fiction. And she compares a tabloid like the Daily News to Le Monde, which runs no photographs. And the suggestion here is that by giving us pictures, the tabloid, in fact is farther away from truth than just the written word. And I think there's something to that. So that's what I take as the first of a kind of one, two punch at the end of the essay, a negative view of things. And then the other is more generally about photography fragmenting the world and getting at, I think, what you were. You just mentioned, which is the kind of foreclosure of genuine understanding because it makes the world seem more available than it actually is. We give ourselves the illusion of knowing things by way of the camera, the photograph. But we're denying the depth behind that surface. And so for that reason, I think she says, this is page 18 in my book. Basically, they can never give us political or ethical knowledge. So while it can goad conscience, it can finally never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. You know, there's a little bit of positive light here, the idea that it can goad conscience, for instance, in certain contexts. And we're also not, you know, we're not hearing about film, you know, except for that part that you noted about putting still photos in sequence in a film. Is film better? I don't know. 10:06 Erin: I think it is. I think it is. She does call television a stream of under selected images, right? Each one canceling out the one before or something like that. And so that under selection seems to kind of exonerate it in a way and also make it less interesting. I should say that I think there could be more positive. I read the first four in the book for the purposes of the podcast. I've in the past read the whole book, so I could be just not remembering a more positive. She does say in one of the essays, for instance, I remember that photographs don't teach us about surprising things that are ugly. You know, they don't surprise us really with ugliness, but they can surprise us with beauty. So that they could be a way to find more in the world, which is surprisingly beautiful. So that would be an example of something I could think of which is a positive statement about photography. But for the most part, the relentless criticism. And she's someone who enjoyed film, and film has a bunch of implications which make it fall outside of the critiques that she levies against photographs. Like just the mere fact that if it's a. If it's a film with a plot, it's not purporting to be an image of something real or of something that really happened. I mean, it is insofar as those actors really were all standing together in a room. Maybe not anymore, but it used to be evidence that they were all standing together in a room. But I think it has just a vastly different set of moral qualities about it. But she says only that which narrates can make us understand and that we need narrative. Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no, Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph. And then later in the paragraph, only that which narrates can make us understand. So this. This very idea that we need narration is, I think, what I'm getting at here when I'm describing that she's implicitly making this argument that aristocracy is some kind of middle road. That can help, because I think that's. That's the implication of needing a narrative who is only that which narrates can make us understand. Well, what is going to narrate to us, what narration are we going to receive? Who is going to be the one who narrates? That's very opaque to me. But it seems we do need a narrator. There are people who by implication here are in some sort of privileged position to be able to narrate these images to us. 12:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important. So in a way, we need a point of view. And the photograph might give us the idea that we have a view from nowhere, in a sense, but also because it can't give us all the context and it can't give us a narrative and it's outside of time in a sense. Or it doesn't cover an expanse of time. It doesn't give us the ability to fully understand, which is not by itself a problem, except that it gives us the illusion of understanding because it's. Look, there's reality. 13:09 Erin: Right, Right. And so this is where everybody is the king of their own kingdom of mental images, determining which is making up meaning from within that image world. Even though the possibility of finding meaning in a given image is entirely dependent on it being properly narrativized so that we might superimpose meanings on images which aren't really there. 13:34 Wes: She gives this great. Just around the place where you read. The camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses. In contrast to the amorous relation which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions and functioning, takes place in time and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. I hope I didn't just reread exactly the same quote. Maybe it's worth rereading twice. So that's very important. Understanding requiring an understanding of function and therefore requiring the inclusion of time and the need for narration. 14:14 Erin: And this refusal idea, which I should tip my hand a little bit more and explain that. The reason why this stuck out to me and why I suddenly wanted to think about a positive ethics of relations of our relationship to photography is that I got into a kind of argument with somebody a couple of weeks ago when I said that I didn't like to expose myself to certain images. 14:38 Wes: Why they can't see you. Just kidding. 14:42 Erin: And I was concerned about being inured to. I mean, specifically, we were talking about Game of Thrones and I just said that I really didn't. I knew about the kinds of things that are in Game of Thrones and I did. And I realized this is obviously like dwarves, we've just been taught. Yes, exactly. 14:59 Wes: That's why you can't look at Diane Arbus either. 15:02 Erin: Exactly. No, but, you know, we were talking about that show, and I said, oh, you know, it seems like it would be a really interesting show to watch, and I just can't. I'm really hypersensitive to this. Like, I've tried to basically maintain my sensitivity by not exposing myself to certain images because I do not want to desensitize myself. And this person thought that in doing so, I was coddling myself, essentially, and that I had a fundamentally immature relationship to the subject matter by not seeing these things, which I really disagreed with. And I. You know, all of that came back again. Somehow the Sontag came up at this interesting time where I had just had that conversation, and I thought, well, what she's really advocating for here is something similar to what I was arguing, which is a kind of hygiene of vision. Her idea seems to be that the worst thing we could do is not intervene in a situation which requires our intervention. So having a camera in our hand, I think, for Sontag, can be problematic in that there might be a situation which needs our help or our intervention. And by holding a camera, we might not be able to intervene and help someone. We might simply be in a voyeuristic relationship to, say, a mugging. I don't know. So we should be in a position where we are able to help the person being mugged instead of just standing there going, oh, this is great. I'm capturing a mugging live on my iPhone, you know, and I'm going to broadcast it to my followers. So I think that what Sontag is saying is that we need to be able to intervene, and that is what is negative about having a camera. And that part of our ability to intervene or to even recognize that something that is happening is wrong or bad or whatever ugly or something is not being inured to those occurrences by simply being inundated with lots of examples of that so that we are no longer able to even determine that, you know, this is a very extreme example, but we're not even able to determine that a mugging is bad, right. So that we can't even intervene in the mugging because we don't think it's particularly bad, because, well, we're inundated with images of muggings every day, so it's a normal thing. So we might as well just photograph it instead of intervening in some way. Again, that's a silly and sort of extreme example that I'm using just to illustrate what I think her point is. So something about, I think, not desensitizing ourselves seems to be important to Sontag, so that we maintain our sensitivity to things which deserve that sensitivity, so that we can be properly morally outraged when confronted with real moral outrages, and so that we can intervene when a situation needs our intervention. I think that is ultimately what she's saying, must be preserved from the jaws of photography. But that may not be accurate and I may simply be interpreting this so as to win the mental argument that I'm still having with this person. Right. Well, I think, I mean, I think 18:09 Wes: clearly she's, you know, she's pointing to this double edged sword of the. There's the capacity of photography to arouse the conscience and then. But it can also inure us, as you're pointing out, and she points out, but. And it does that in the same way it shocks us. But then if we get shocked enough times, we can be inured. And then. So the question is, do I avoid all exposure? Do I try to titrate it? Do I try to get just the right amount of exposure? Or do I atrocity. Do atrocity porn all day? This is kind of a dilemma with the news, right? 18:48 Erin: Yes, exactly. 18:49 Wes: And it doesn't need to be photographic. I think, unfortunately, even when there's narrative, in the case of the news, it can be bad for us. So I kind of have a compromise where I look at it a little bit, but then I try not to linger over it anymore just because it's not because I have self discipline, but just because it's gotten so depressing. But it frees up a lot of time. So I want to maintain some awareness, but I don't want to harm myself by doing that. I don't want to just have my head in the sand. But on the other hand, I want to protect myself. 19:19 Erin: Just to bring in the essay here, she says to suffer is one thing. Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. And that's really important is, I think for her is to strengthen that conscience and the ability to be compassionate, to be able to act, to be able to intervene. It can also. This is Sontag again. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more images. Transfix images anesthetize an event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs. Think of the Vietnam War. But after repeated exposure to images, it also becomes less real. And I think that is a problem. She Goes on to talk about pornography and the anesthetizing that. That happens when we. When the shock of pornography wears off. And then she says in these last decades, quote, unquote, concerned photography, that is, you know, photography which is designed to arouse our ethical function by showing us atrocities that we should be outraged by. Concerned photography has done at least as to deaden conscience as to arouse it. Yeah. So again, this sends me into, you know, this, this question of, okay, then, what is the proper amount? What is a proper comportment to images? Which sends me down that sort of aristocratic rabbit hole. Who's going to be responsible for determining what is the correct amount of exposure by the masses to these images? To a certain extent, it's. It is media corporations. 20:53 Wes: It's not going to be the sovereign. Plato in Plato's Republic. I was thinking about the argument between Plato and Aristotle earlier when you're talking about Game of Thrones, because the Platonic argument is that you could be corrupted by identifying with the person or the God doing the immoral thing. You get infected with their passions and your soul can be. Your character can be corrupted by it. And I think there's a point to that. And then the Aristotelian argument is actually. No, there's a cathartic effect. I can identify with characters, even characters doing crazy, violent things without necessarily being contaminated by them. There's a more complicated psychological relationship. I think they're both right to some extent. 21:36 Erin: Well, I think that's about the narrative element of Game of Thrones, whereas I'm concerned more with what Sontag is talking about here. I don't want those images in my head. 21:44 Wes: Yeah, well, that's a good distinction. Yeah, that's an important distinction. I was going to add to that. I do think the. It's an important point that they're talking about ancient Greek plays. Right. So there's an important visual part of this, including the masks. But leaving that aside, I think narrative is a problem too. And this came up in one of my first subtext episodes, which you were not on, but it about Slaughterhouse 5. And there's a worry in that novel about can you write about any of this without actually sensationalizing it or glorifying it in some way? Can you do that with war? Because war is exciting. And so even for narration, I think it becomes a problem or remains a problem, let's put it that way. I think narration helps. Well, let me give another example. When I was an animal healthcare reporter, worked for the Animal Healthcare magazine, I wrote a very Positive. I'm sure I've told this story before, but I wrote a very positive profile of someone who started one of the first animal cruelty sections within a police department. Yeah. She wasn't happy with the profile because it was fictionalized. Not because I put in any wrong facts, but just because I created a narrative. I created a story out of it, tried to make it interesting to an audience. And that by itself, even if everything is. We fact checked. We had a fact checker calling people. That by itself is distorting. That's kind of why I said you need a point of view. You need someone to be an essayist. I think in the end, whether they're doing that with photographs or with words or with a documentary. And that's the other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about sequencing in time. And you can write. Documentaries will include photographic stills often, and then contextual narrative around it. Think of something like Ken Burns, and then you have the right music, you got it all. 23:33 Erin: Great actors to read out letters. 23:36 Wes: Good voice, good narrators. Such good voices. The problem she's identifying doesn't go away. There's something better about the idea that one is involved in an essay. One is involved in making a point or having a point of view. And that it's not just a view from nowhere. I take a picture of my cat. Yep, that's my cat. She really exists. That's objective reality. But if I take a picture of her posing. Because she's also a model supermodel and she likes to pose. Yeah, that's an opinion. I mean, it's not an opinion that she's a supermodel. That's a fact. Or that she's beautiful. But it's. The particular posing in the photograph is an opinion. And that's a segue to chapter two, America Seen Through Photographs Darkly. Because it. Or to the second essay. Sorry, because it. Right. Part of the point is that Arbus is. She's got an agenda. She's got a certain opinion. And it's a kind of leveling thing where everything is made grotesque, whether it's actual freaks or just suburbanites. And this kind of condescending attitude towards suburbanites is something you interestingly see in contemporary streaming shows. Isn't it quaint that people are so normal? Aren't they cute? 24:55 Erin: Yes, that's right. 24:57 Wes: But it starts from. And I mean, it's such a great essay, but it starts from this. She traces it back to kind of. To Walt Whitman's idea of a democratic embrace of all experience, where I Think the point is to lift up ordinary life and say, oh, isn't everything majestic in some sense? Or isn't everything a manifestation of God or whatever? So it's in the same tradition, but it's actually leveling down rather than leveling up. But at least we know there's curation to that. But at least we understand, even if we don't like that project, that we're engaged with someone who is engaged in that kind of what you'll call surrealist project. For depicting America as a surrealist nation. 25:42 Erin: The hyper selection of Arbus work really suggests a distinct point of view, much like the HBO imperative to deliberately show things as disgusting as they could possibly be for the purposes of titillation. But they I was most interested in. In her analysis of Arbus character, she ultimately ascribes a naivete which is both coy and sinister. She says in the photograph's acceptance of the appalling. This is at the paragraph beginning. The most striking aspect of Arbus's work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises, concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate, but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. She talks about Arbus's aggressiveness toward the public, which has been treated as a moral accomplishment. This is just a fabulous essay. I love this essay. I think this is the best thing ever written about Arbus, who, if she did bother you before, will certainly bother you after you read this. Yeah. So the naivete of these photographs, Sontag says, is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other. Sontag says that there's a deliberate desire on Arbus part to inure us, to deaden our response to this kind of thing or to show us things that are shocking. And then the comportment that we have, say, in the art gallery, I mean, you know, we can imagine being people in the early 60s encountering this in a gallery. We're supposed to not be horrified by this or not show that we're horrified by this. Right. We're supposed to actually affect total nonchalance in the face of some very disturbing 27:32 Wes: images like that nudist camp woman with the apron. Yes, yes, topless, but except for an apron, because you don't want to spill coffee on yourself. You want to get coffee all over your thighs. I don't know. 27:48 Erin: Right. 27:49 Wes: There's times when clothing is just necessary. Okay, maybe not stay warm, but she 27:55 Erin: calls this a Self willed test of hardness, both on the part of Arbus and I suppose on the part of the people who look at Arbus photographs. And that ultimately the intent that people like Arbus have in going out and collecting these images of pain is not to feel more, but to feel less. And that too seems to be part of an inherent part of Sontag's say, moral vision, such as we can piece it together in these two essays, which is that we should be trying to feel more, not less. So I would say that this deadening is for Sontag a very negative thing, that we should be trying to preserve some kind of sensitivity. And because she says here, here, here is the key, it works out not as a liberation of, but as a subtraction from the self. A pseudo familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life. I think that's as much kind of the moral key for Sontag as any sentence in here. So that subtraction from the self is what happens, I think, when she's saying, when we expose ourselves to these deadening images, we actually have less self as a result of this. In a way, it's what you're describing with the belief that being photographed takes away part of your soul or something like that. This is Sontag's transmogrification of that idea. 29:16 Wes: There's a part just for the one that you're focusing in on, where she talked about. Whitman preached empathy, concord and discord, oneness and diversity, psychic intercourse with everything, everybody plus sensual union. When he could get it is the giddy trip that is proposed explicitly over and over again in the prefaces of the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also dictated his poetry's form and tone. Whitman's poems are a psychic technology for chanting the reader into a new state of being and then a little lower, meant to get readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to the height where they can identify with the past and with the community of American desire. But this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now. So yeah, with Whitman you get this impetus to merger in a way with the past and with others, this impulse to oneness. And that's precisely what you're not getting with Arbus. The monsters that she's photographing are not inviting you to identify with them. Right, Since a lot of them are ugly. People can go look at her, her photography, but it's basically like trying to create a freak show out of everything, even out of maybe a normal couple standing there, depending on the way things are framed. So there's a kind of anti humanist message here, according to Sontag. 30:48 Erin: Yes. And Arbus doesn't want you to feel distance from that, though that's what's really interesting. Is this not. What was the word you used with Whitman? 30:58 Wes: Identification or merging? 31:00 Erin: Identification or merger. You're not supposed to feel that identification at all. But what's aggressive Sontag is saying about the photos is that she doesn't allow you to feel any distance from them. So it's like you're in close quarters with the other. And it's designed to make you feel this intense discomfort for that closeness and for the way in which these people are being photographed. And yet that feeling, that otherness, very intensely is part of it. So it's a sort of anti merger. You're put up close and it's designed to induce this reaction of discomfort, embarrassment, pain, shock, all of these things, which words which I think Sontag uses to characterize the experience of being in contact with these images. The most interesting observation, I think for me in the whole essay is when Sontag says that Arbus's interest in freaks. This is on page 43 in my Picador edition. Arbus's interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged to vent her frustration at being safe. I love that. That's. I think that's really key. I think a lot of people are reacting against safety by trying to, say, manufacture instances in which they remain safe but which feel unsafe to try and shock themselves into some. What they perceive as being some sort of more authentic relationship with the world. Anyway, I found that to be incredibly insightful and fascinating and it was somehow recognizable to me. It's psychologically revealing about Arbus, but it also reveals something about maybe what we might call the false promise of photography, which is to give us a sense that we've experienced something outside of our comfort zone in a way which is prepackaged and which doesn't actually come with any of the attendant, say, moral lessons that real experience might provide. Do you know what I'm saying? So there's something, I think illustrative about all of our relationship with photography in the character analysis she does of Arbus in this moment. Though it's also very specific and interestingly revealing about Arbus particular character. 33:12 Wes: Yeah, she says that the photographs in a way are too cool for school. It's like the compassionate response to them is supposed to be irrelevant. We're not supposed to feel horrified. Right. When we look at the Pictures, we're too cool for that kind of thing. And one might see that as a kind of way to destigmatize and to level experience and say, well, nothing is really freaky or everything is really freaky. But I think she sees it as a kind of unsavory inurement to reality. Right? 33:42 Erin: Yeah. 33:42 Wes: She contrasts Arbus kind of middle class or privileged, maybe upper middle class, yes, quite privileged Jewish existence and this enhanced desire to seek out a kind of corrective for that, to seek out some sort of adversity and violate her own incidents, sorry, innocence and you know, overcome the sense of being privileged. 34:08 Erin: I think everybody is suffering from this to a certain extent in the modern era because we don't actually have enough friction in our lives. And I think we feel the lack of what we might call experiences that are meaning making or character building because we're not suffering in the ways that previous generations have suffered. I mean people are certainly, they're suffering in different ways, but ways which are maybe less legible to us than what we're used to or what we think of in our minds as being acceptable or historically ways in which we might develop ourselves. And I think people feel the lack of that and they try to create those almost like self impose that suffering through a variety of other means. And so I think that is a little bit of what Sontag is getting at here. This is the way that Arbus is trying to do it by taking these close up shots with, with these people who look freaky and forcing us to look at it and be uncomfortable. And then we're supposed to just sort of look at it and act very nonchalant. And I remember being in a, I remember being in a museum with a, with a friend of mine from college who had none of the, I guess, training and nonchalance that people usually get at some point than going to museums or just, I don't know, learning, learning some sort of disaffected behavior from the people around them. And so we went into some modern art exhibit. I don't even remember what it was, but I just remember her going, oh my God, you know, like, like really loudly having these reactions and calling a lot of attention to herself. And now of course reading this, I'm like, of course, you know, she was actually doing the exact right thing. And probably Sontag would approve of that reaction because it's proof that she hadn't been anesthetized. She's actually having a real authentic reaction rather than a put on of, mmm, yeah, you're looking at something horrifying and you're supposed to just shrug your shoulders and walk on to the next image and brush it off. I think to a certain extent Sontag is saying we should maybe refuse to do that or we should recognize the falseness in doing that at least. 36:12 Wes: Yeah, there's a cynicism to it. And this maybe we can give listeners a taste of the way she ends the essay. Bringing it back to Whitman and making equivalences between freaks, mad people, suburban couples and nudists is a very powerful judgment, one in complicity with a recognizable political mood shared by many educated left liberal Americans. The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different, Whitman's democratic vista. Everybody is shown to look the same. Succeeding the more buoyant hopes for America has come. A bitter, sad embrace of experience. There's a particular melancholy in the American Photographic project, but the melancholy was already latent in the heyday of Whitman esque affirmation, including Stieglitz. So I'm skipping a little bit. So the Whitman esque appetites have turned pious. The photographer now patronizes reality photographers with less ego and magnetism. than Stieglitz gradually gave up the struggle. They might continue to practice atomistic visual stenography. The atomistic visual stenography inspired by Whitman, but without Whitman's delirious powers of synthesis. What they documented was discontinuity, detritus, loneliness, greed, sterility. So it ends in a way on the same note as the last essay with this movement towards atomism. Right. We started out with Whitman's leveling, being about a movement towards unity. And this is still a leveling, but it's more about we all end up the same level as our own little freaky disconnected atoms, rather than being somehow ennobled together. 38:03 Erin: I mean, it just gets worse from here. Right. There's no stopping this train. So maybe I've been wrong all along to look for some sort of alternative or instructions for a solution. 38:17 Wes: America has been discovered as the quintessential surrealist country. That's the one that I wanted to get to. This idea of succumbing to surrealism. 38:28 Erin: Yeah. 38:28 Wes: So quite pessimistic. And it sounds like from what, you know, the rest of the book, there's not much optimism. 38:36 Erin: Well, I mean, yeah. Though I don't want to give listeners the impression that these aren't exhilarating and really fun essays to read. 38:43 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think you're doing well as a country if you have a writer like this. Yeah, she's amazing. So. Yeah, that's why I talked about a point of view in the essay. In the end, this is an argument for being a great essayist as opposed to a stenographer. And photography lends itself to stenography. 39:05 Erin: Right. 39:05 Wes: All right. Any last words before we put America to bed? No. 39:10 Erin: No. I love that. Sontag herself is the solution. That's music to my ears. 39:18 Wes: All right. Thank you. 39:20 Erin: Thank. You.

Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin: Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof, but can't, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which paradoxically atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile world in his or her head. Today we're discussing two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography in Plato's Cave and Seen Through Photographs Darkly, and asking what constitutes photography's ethics of seeing and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just coincidentally, I've been printing out tons of photographs over the last few days of my sister at various stages of her life because I'm the maid of honor for her wedding and I'm throwing her bridal shower. So, you know, we had decided to cover these essays. And then just over the last couple days, I happened to be looking through old family photo albums anyway, so it's been a strange thing to read these essays in tandem with that. And I've been thinking about how attached I am. I wouldn't say that I take a lot of photos, but I love photos. I love photos of family. I have photos everywhere, and various apartments I've lived in have always been covered in photos. I just wonder what your relationship is. You don't strike me as someone who takes a lot of photos either. Do you have a lot of photo albums? Are there certain photos that you love looking at? Do you have attachments to photos? 2:10 Wes: I do have some photo albums and I used to curate those much more actively when I was in my 20s and maybe 30s, but because it's become much less common to actually, you know, there was a time when you had to take your disposable camera to the. To the pharmacy and have them do their magic. And you. 2:32 Erin: I'm going to the pharmacy after this to pick up. Oh, really? Yeah, because I'm making displays which are for the bridal shower, so I have to go pick up prints from CVS for the first time in years. Just later this afternoon. 2:48 Wes: Amazing. That's the. 2:49 Erin: The coincidences that. Bizarre. 2:51 Wes: Yeah. You know, and then you'd have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, and it was. But sad to say, I think the. What do you even call them? What's the thing? You keep your photos in the binder. Those are in storage. And I've digitized everything. I digitized everything. And I digitized a bunch of my mom's photos that she had kind of lying around because I wanted some of those. But she would always. She's always worried about me taking her photos. You know, like, it was always a thing with my mom and me. Like, she accused me of stealing her books, which I. Which I did, and taking the taking as a kid, you know, like taking her books out of her room and putting them in my room or out of the living room and just putting them on the shelves in my room. But anyway, yeah, now I have a digital collection, and I can't say that I spend a lot of time looking at that, except for pictures of my cat. Those are like the main pictures that I take if I go on a vacation. So recently I was in Tucson and went up to Mount Lemmon and did various things. So I'll take a few photos. How do I put this? I don't take a lot. I don't like the way it. It's, you know, for reasons that Sontag talks about, the way it interrupts the experience, or it feels like I'm trying to behave in an acquisitive way towards the experience or commodify it. And also, I don't know what the point is exactly. I mean, you see people taking so many photos. It's like, how would you ever have the time in your life to go back and look at all the photos that you're taking? No one's going to even have the time. It goes into the cloud, the cloud storage, and that's it. And it's reassuring to know that it exists there. So you have that you could go back to it, but she probably won't. 4:39 Erin: It occurred to me that a lot of what Sontag covers in the essays is just even more apparent now with the iPhone. And so a lot of this seems to me to be super relevant. But one of the phenomena that I've been talking about with a friend of mine in relation to this. Yeah, just these thousands and thousands of images that live on our phones or on our computers is, I think, this further, I don't know, democratization of experience that she's talking about, which is, you know, how you go into. Into iphotos and it'll show you. Well, first of all, everything is organized by date. There are maps, too. Like, you could look at the map of the world and see the photos that you've taken in different locations. But specifically this on this date function where it will show you what you were doing on the same day a year ago, five years ago, whatever. And Facebook does this too, right? With Facebook memories, which I was obsessed with for a while, probably around the time that it first rolled out or when I first noticed it, which might have been a long time afterwards. And it had this curious effect, specifically the days in which it would. There was nothing that you had posted on that day in all the years that you've had Facebook, if you, if you know it's today is March 2nd, if there was nothing that you ever did on March 2nd that you posted on Facebook about it would tell you you have no memories on this day, which I thought was, you know, chilling. And it would. It almost spurs you to want to. I mean, it doesn't for me, but it would spur you to want, know what you were doing on that day or to post something so that next year, on March 2, you would have something that, you know, some evidence that you existed on that day. But in, in relation to this, this democratization, it's as if all of these photo apps now want every day to be like an anniversary or a birthday. Every day becomes a significant day. So insofar as every experience a photograph, as Sontag says, becomes flattened. Everyone who's. Who's photographed is a celebrity and therefore everyone is a celebrity and therefore nobody's a celebrity. This tying it to a date so that you might be, you know, 50 years ago. You might be photographed every, every year on your birthday and every year at school picture day or something like that. And other than that, maybe you don't have. And graduation, maybe you don't have very many everyday photos of your life now. It's as though every day of the year is some kind of big event. And if you don't have a photograph from that specific date, there's this black hole in your photographic record. The attempt to capture everything in your life and therefore give meaning to every moment of your life. And obviously the flip side of that is taking away meaning in every moment of your life. That creep, it just seems to get more and more like, I wonder what the next step is beyond that. Once, once every day has become an anniversary, you know, is it going to show you what you were doing hour by hour, minute by minute, where you were what. When you go places, will it ping on your phone? Your past photographs from that particular street corner, Starbucks, hotel, me get pen, I 7:42 Wes: need to write these ideas down, because I can get AI to Vibe code this for me. 7:49 Erin: I don't know what the point of any of this is, just that, yeah, I was really interested in this idea of an imperializing democracy that Sontag pinpoints. And that's kind of the. Where I wanted to begin. But I'm going about it in a very weird way. 8:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. A kind of leveling that between experiences that becomes overpowering or subjects us. Is that the idea? 8:12 Erin: Yeah. She makes the point very subtly. She says on page seven, this is in Plato's cave. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning, to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. It's a bit of a stretch, but I just noted the proximity in the paragraph. I mean, they're a sentence apart from each other. Imperial and democratize. So the sense that it's a. It's that photography is attempting to colonize the whole world. But what it's doing really is setting up the pseudo world of images which stands in parallel to the actual world. Everything in the world is captured in individual photographs. So everything is atomized, it's democratized because anything photographed becomes equivalent to anything else that is photographed. And then there's also this democracy where we're all imperial rulers over. Over the image world that we've constructed in our own heads that gives us the impression that we own it or that we understand it or that we can see it and kind of map it in our own heads, whether we've been to these places or not. And that that's somehow given to everybody. So we're all emperors over our own internal image worlds. And the equality of that is the democratic part, I suppose. I think something like really complex is happening in the. In her use of those two terms side by side. 9:51 Wes: Right. There's a sense in which photographs become an aid to memory. And they can also become a replacement for memory. And that's part of the problem. So the minute that you're taking a snapshot of something on a vacation, it takes you out of the experience because, again, it gives you the sense that you've acquired it. And I've put it in my little box. My little. It's like taking a note now. I don't have to, really. If I don't have to rely on memory, then why let myself be as immersed in the experience as I might otherwise? Let myself be. Because that's on the record. Something like that. But here, at the point that you were quoting her, she had just talked about how despite the fact that photographs are used as evidence and they can incriminate and they can justify and they suggest that something exists, there's always the selection. Selection becomes a kind of interpretation. We decide what we're going to photograph and when we're going to photograph them and how. And eventually, as we get into the other essay, how people are going to pose and all of that stuff. So she mentions taking shots of sharecroppers in a way that'll express their poverty and dignity, for instance. But the other aspect here, I think that you're getting at is the kind of aggression that's paradoxically involved in passivity and ubiquity. So maybe just to read. We'll give people an idea, since she's such a fabulous essayist. I'll just read it. Images which idealize, like most fashion and animal photography, are no less aggressive than work, which makes a virtue of plainness. Like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort and mugshots, there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as it is in all the succeeding decades during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Juliet Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron, who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. I think you already read this. Right from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent photography in photography from its very beginning. To democratize all experiences by translating them into images. So it's there. Interestingly, the kind of thing that the advance of technology makes possible, I think she thinks is already there from the very beginning, this democratization of experience. But it really accelerates it. And then we get into the ubiquity of it with everyone has a pocket camera, and little did she know that real it would all just be in the phone. You'd sound like a crazy person if you said that around this time. And everyone would just have phones in their pockets that were also cameras. 13:04 Erin: I guess another way of putting this is to say that photography is an aggressive imperialistic enforcement of a democratic relationship to the world, which is to say a sort of enforced equality or flattening. That paragraph, I think, is the most interesting in an essay full of just the most brilliant paragraphs. 13:27 Wes: Agreed. 13:28 Erin: In response to what you said about. About photographs becoming a replacement of memory, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that's even more true now. I mean, I think it's true in a way that Sontag never could have anticipated. I mean, she's. She's already sort of hinting at it, of course, But I do think that there's something almost quaint now, or in fact, quite quaint about actual physical photo albums. She talks about the elegiac quality of photos and photos being a memento mori, which I think is a little bit different from being an aide to memory. You know, so you look back through a photo album and it might trigger a memory of a certain day or even how you were feeling in that moment, but really, it seems designed for pathos. And as she talks about capturing somebody at a moment which is now past or now dead or an earlier version of that person. Right. And I think now what we have is maybe rather than walking around with these image worlds in our head, these facsimiles of the world in our head, as she's suggesting, photographs supply us with. Really, we're walking around with these facsimiles of the world in our phones, and we've exported this external hard drive. We've exported all of our memories to this object as well, so that we don't have to hold onto the memories in our heads, even in the way that Sontag is describing in the essay. You know, we've sort of gone beyond this and all of our function when it comes to recalling something. Like, it could be triggered by seeing photos in the phone. But primarily we're exporting that memory to the phone, and it's containing much vaster quantities of photos than an album could hold. So it does become like memory, like an external hard drive for our memories. 15:17 Wes: Because of that, we sort of interfere with memory. I think part of the thing is memory implies loss, right? Because the thing is no longer around and because the memory of it is going to fade. And because a memory is more than the visual experience, right? There's also the emotions involved. And you're on a family trip and people are annoying you and maybe you're bored or have to go to the bathroom. There's a lot of other stuff outside of the picture of you looking happy in front of the mountain or whatever it is. So there is a kind of manic quality, or what I would call a manic defense quality to photography. Naturally, it's a defense against loss with actual memory. Loss is just a part of it. And that's kind of the way she begins her book, right. Talking about how photography redefines our relationship to the real world in these very. In terms of acquisition, we have the photographs on our external hard drive, on our phone. It's like appropriation, the idea that for some societies, being photographed might steal one's soul. Well, I kind of think we act as if we're sucking the soul of the world into the phone or into the camera to keep it with us. And then, of course, we can manipulate. I mean, she talks about blowing up and retouching photographs, you know, and we don't even. We don't even do that anymore, but we can put them into digital folders or put them on social media and do all sorts of other virtual types of manipulation with them. And since the time when she wrote this essay, that the ability to share these photographs, that was enhanced incredibly by social media and Facebook and things like that. And it used to be fun. Facebook used to be fun. I don't know if people remember that now. It's just something that I. And most people I know just avoid unless they have to do something on it for some reason. And why is that? I don't know exactly beyond politics or beyond envy of seeing people live their shiny lives on Facebook with the vacations. I don't know what it is, but it became. Something went sour with that. And part of it, I guess, is just the getting sucked into this activity of putting one's life on blast or advertising your life to other people and trying to get them to see you and them trying to get you to see them. I don't know what it is, but anyway, I kind of digress there. Really what I was trying to get at was the manic quality of this and the idea that there's some kind of power and control and acquisition in taking photos. And even the fact that you can kind of make time stand still, as she points out. You just get a slice of time. There's an element of incredible power in 18:21 Erin: all that, I guess, to go into the personal for a second. I sometimes forget to take photographs and wish that I had taken them. But also, I think I sometimes don't take. Want to get out the phone and start taking photographs, because for me, I've always been dissatisfied by the photos that I take because I feel as though they never really capture what I'm seeing, right. Like, I guess I'm just not a good enough photographer where I feel as though anytime I capture something and then I look at it in the phone, I'm like, oh, well, that's not really what it. 18:52 Wes: You gotta put it in portrait. Portrait mode. 18:54 Erin: Gotta put it. I know you taught me that, 18:58 Wes: but I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I know. I, That's. And that's part of my reluctance. I just know it looks so plain in the photograph, but it's so amazing, you know? 19:08 Erin: Exactly, exactly. And so then what I do is I take 45 photos of the exact same thing at slightly different tilts and then I. 19:17 Wes: You're playing paying for the cloud storage now. 19:19 Erin: Exactly. Well, no. And so then I. Well, so I have, I guess, many, many thousands fewer images than all of my friends, I think. Because then what I do is I, I don't want to take the photos because then I have to go in and choose which of the 45 I'm going to save for posterity. And I'm clicking back and forth between the one image and then the next image one inch to the left and the next image one inch to the left of that, you know, and, and so I, I think part of it is I don't take the photo because I don't want to put myself through that because I then have to edit everything and get down to the one image because I'm going, okay, I can't have 45 images of the same thing. I just have to choose. And usually it's a very arbitrary. And just say, okay, fine, this one, you know, but none of them satisfies me. None of them ever seems to me a good encapsulation of the moment. It doesn't capture the beauty, it doesn't capture the whatever. And that's simply because, you know, as she points out in the essay, it's just a slice. It's just, you know, the frame. What's being cut out really severely limits what the photograph can capture. And what. I mean, they're really. Photos are really unrealistic. It's stupid to maybe to point out something so obvious, but they're so limited and they're so unrealistic. Not only are they playing with scale as she talks about, but they're cutting out so much of what was live and real and, you know, obviously 3D and in the round about the experience that I think of them as being. I mean, I'm so grateful to have the certain photos that I do of people and obviously having Baby photos of people or photos of loved ones who are. Who are now no longer with us is. You know, it seems like photography is an incredible gift, but also I've always had this really frustrated relationship to it, probably because I'm just not a very good photographer. And they seem like strangely bad approximations of the world that they're purporting to capture. Exactly. You know, I often think that light in a painting is a much, much better illustration of light. 21:23 Wes: Yeah. They can convey the power of the scene more accurately, in a sense, bring some of the emotion. I mean, a good photograph can do some of that. But. Yeah, in general, with our snapshots, it's not going to happen as well. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. So she points to this. Most photography has nothing to do with art, and it does serve this function, according to the Sontag, of memorializing family life, for instance, including weddings. It's a very important part of big events and tourism, as we've talked about. And I think the thing that she highlights is that as the society becomes more atomized and there's more industrialization and people can travel more, this becomes a kind of desperate way to deal with that fact as community fades, as communal ties are less strong, and you begin replacing that with this kind of ritual of. Of picture taking for families. But it's not going to replace the ties that are being lost. 22:24 Erin: Yeah. That idea that photos are a kind of prosthesis of the larger family that's been lost in the reduction to the nuclear family that oftentimes all we have of those extended relations are photographs of those family members rather than those people living in the house. Say, if we were in a two or three family home or something like that. 22:46 Wes: I love this idea, too, that on vacation we might feel guilty about not being at work. Right. It gives us something to do. We have a job now. We're a photographer while we're on vacation. 22:59 Erin: Right. 23:00 Wes: But it's a way of, you know, in general of, you know, she says, refusing experience or damping down experience by using the camera, putting the camera between yourself and the experience to deal with the anxiety of that. But that includes the guilt. So she says a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it. By limiting experience to a search for the photogenic. By converting experience into an image, a super souvenir assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter this Gives shapes to experience, stop, take a photograph and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic. Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working. When they're on vacation and supposed to be having fun, they have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work. They can take pictures. I think that's very, very true. 24:03 Erin: It is. 24:04 Wes: It's hard just to stop and experience, you know, just the pause. 24:08 Erin: Yeah. I think of my grandfather when I read that, who. His photos are all over this. I'm in my grandmother's house right now. His photos are all over the walls of the house from all their many, many travels all over the world. And he was someone who retired very young, but he had this. He was never fully resting. You know, he was retired. But there was always something to do. You know, there was always work in the garden to do. There was always cooking and shopping to do and things to fix. You know, he had had his workbench downstairs and would always. I never knew what he was doing, but he was always hammering at something or putting things together. And. And so I think that that must have been, you know, the picture taking must have been a kind of version of this. You know, he's on vacation, but he still has a job to do. And there are actually pictures of him with multiple cameras around his neck for different. You know, he would have like the video camera and the different lenses and was really into that and got into that actually, when he was in the army. So I also have all of these photos of his several albums of Munich in 1945 and different buildings, which. I've always wanted to go to Germany and see if I could find the buildings that he was in. And which I have, you know, so detailed are the records that he took pictures, for instance, of street signs so you could locate the exact corner, you know, that the building was on. 25:25 Wes: Wow. 25:26 Erin: Yeah. It strikes me now is that he might have been sort of an anxious person, since a lot of this is also supposedly a defense against anxiety, which I think is. Which I think is right, too. I made a list of, across the two essays of the three sets of moral relationships and how Sontag characterizes them. The relationship between the photographer and the camera is one moral relationship that she describes which has many different characteristics. Each of these does the relationship between the photographer and the thing photograph the subject and then the relationship between people and the photographic images that they view. So the viewer and the image, all of the things that we've talked about so far, primarily that between photographer and camera. So as you described, the appearance of participation without participation, the refusal of experience, putting the camera between the self and the event to soothe, as a defense against anxiety, to relieve disorientation, the work like activity. And then we get into a couple of things that have much deeper moral implications. So the camera as a kind of a gun, as something automated, requiring no skill or expert knowledge, as she points out. And then also the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. And some of this shades into the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. But the idea that one is freed from responsibility towards those things or people or events which are photographed, that that implies a certain lack of intervention and maybe even this implicit approbation. You're saying when you take a photograph of something that you want it to keep going, which I thought was one of the most interesting elements, that. That it's encouraging something to keep happening in an implicit way. But then also there's this distance that's required. If you're going to take a photo of something, you need to be at least a little bit distant from it in order to capture it. Right. You can't be in the middle of the action. You can't be participating in something fully if you're taking a photograph of it. And you need a little bit of physical distance in order to capture something with a lens. That dichotomy is something we might dig into a little bit more. 27:30 Wes: Yeah. She makes this transition in the essay from the right. The idea that photography seems like an act of non intervention. But if you think about what's happening in say, war photography, to maintain one's position as a photojournalist, one can't get involved. I assume a war photographer would try to save someone's life if they're bleeding out in front of them. But they're certainly not picking up a gun to get involved in the fight. So she makes the point that it is. So it is still a form of participation in the sense it's a complicity with whatever makes something interesting. I think that's what you're getting at with you sort of encouraging something to keep happening by treating it as interesting. Yeah. And then I like this metaphor of the gun because there's something. I mean, she compares it to. She says that there's something perverse about picture taking. Right. And quotes Diane Arbus is saying it's a naughty thing to do, so it can intrude, it can obviously be exploitative and the fact that they're so automated increases this problem. And I was thinking, as you talked about your grandfather, there's a time when actually there's some skill and effort actually still involved. I mean, she thinks what's going on is automated, but the fact that we can just take out our phones and do it, and the phone does practically everything for you, including all these effects, and cheapens it in a way. There's an important relationship between the automation of the machine that you're using and then the target. So with a gun, right, you know, machine gun life becomes even cheaper by virtue of the fact that it's so easy to expel bullets and take out so many people at once. And likewise, people seem more possessable to the extent that you can easily take pictures of them. Right. In a way, it changes our relationship to others. She talks about it as becoming a way of turning them symbolically into objects that we possess. She says to photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed, just as the camera is. A sublimation of the gun to photograph someone is a sublimated murder, a soft murder, appropriate to sad, frightened time. Really great. 30:00 Erin: Yeah. Well, insofar as you're suggesting, and I think really accurately so that the iPhone is now more like the machine gun, I'm wondering if this idea of the photo seeing people as they never see themselves and therefore this being akin to sublimated murder, as she calls it, if the ubiquity of this kind of murder is therefore making people more impervious, or somehow people are getting acclimated to being murdered in this way. Do you know what I mean? Like people now are taking so many selfies, for instance. I mean, the selfie is. Is one thing we might really talk about this new innovation, which is of course not in the Sontag, but if we've now become akin to self murderers or if we have become impervious to this kind of murder because we're seeing ourselves as an outsider all the time. Right? That's really what that is, right? This idea that we're in a sense trapped inside our own bodies, which when I think about it too hard or for too long, I start to feel very claustrophobic that we're never going to see ourselves except through some apparatus outside of us, a mirror or reflection in some other surface or a photo. Therefore, people walking around have an access to us just through their own vision of us, which we can never have of ourselves. And the photograph, as you're saying, and as Sontag says, possesses us in that way so that the photographer bags us like they would game or something like that. But now that we could flip it around, now that we have these phones that have that function where we can view ourselves through that lens pretty regularly, and now that people take, especially like teenagers take photographs of themselves all day long. Yeah. Is that equivalent to a kind of suicide? Is that where Sontag would go with the iPhone? Or would she simply say that people have now become impervious to this kind of murder? Or both? I don't know. You know, these teens, suddenly everyone knows what their best angles are, how to perfectly capture, you know what I mean? Like, they're very savvy about this. 32:09 Wes: Yeah, you got to do. You got to do the duck. The duck lips, apparently. I don't know why people think that helps. 32:16 Erin: It used to take an entire studio system of experts in different areas of, you know, image consulting and curation to help movie stars become the best versions of themselves. And even those movie stars often were not self aware enough to know what was being captured. And now it seems everyone is their own image consultant. And this kind of knowledge is very, very opaque to me. So it's, it's shocking that somebody could apparently successfully do this. To know themselves so well from the outside and to get that kind of distance from the self. It's very eerie to me. 32:51 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking about this idea that when she says it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed and that's a kind of sublimated murder, that people are very comfortable with doing this with themselves. Right. Symbolically possessing themselves with these selfies and the sense in which that is a kind of murder. And of course, anything that puts us into the realm of the image and the imaginary, I think it subtracts from life, you know, in ways that we've. We've talked about before because it takes us outside of the immediate experience, but it is also just concerned with one aspect of the experience, which is the visual. So we're not even worried in that moment, you know, as we haven't. We're like. It's as if we have an image consultant. But we're not worried about our character, for instance. We're just worried about how we look in a particular moment in time in an image. And so we're imagining the other. We're more strongly oriented to the other on a specific axis of the. Involving the image. Right. So there's a lot of Ways to be caught up in how others see us or in the field of recognition that others supply. But how one looks, of course, is just a very, very thin part of that. And to be oriented towards that, I think, is part of this murder and involved with cameras. 34:15 Erin: Oh, I see, yeah. So you're reducing the self, or you're killing off several layers of self in fantasy. 34:23 Wes: Right, yeah. There's benefits to that, because if the image is just a signifier for all the rest of it, well, that's a very controllable thing in the moment. You just have to be able to pose correctly, and then it's not actually about who you are or even how you were feeling at that particular moment. Why not? If you're feeling sad at the tourist site, why not take a picture of yourself looking sad and remember that actual feeling? That's the part of the memory that is apt to get erased by the attempt at being an image consultant to oneself. But she does talk about how the gun replacement thing, and she talks about this with safaris. Right. It's an interesting example. So guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been, what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered mortal needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot, but when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. And so this is a segue into the idea that photography is an instrument of nostalgia. There's a touch of pathos. You can do it even with a grotesque subject. There's something that photography does to dignify the subject and participate in people's mortality, because the subject is going to pass away. So whatever you've preserved. So this runs cross current, I think, to what she's been saying, which is that this preserving quality to photographs highlights, by contrast, the mortality and temporality and temporariness of the objects or subjects that it's recording. My photos are going to live forever in the cloud, but not me. It's not fair. 36:18 Erin: Right, right. Well, once we can upload your consciousness to the cloud, then it'll all be shortly. 36:24 Wes: Soon. 36:24 Erin: Yeah. Then you'll be a collection of photos with a curating consciousness, which. Which is, I think, a little bit of what she's getting at here, but I don't want to get ahead of myself, but the idea that something about the preservation with the camera highlights the temporariness of the thing being photographed, as you put it. This is where things get kind of interestingly tricky. I'm pulling partly from The Arbus essay. This idea of the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. I think Sontag would argue that we need to know what we're taking in a photograph, say of a panda, that pandas are endangered, for that photograph to have some kind of moral purchase. Right. She's going to describe the narrativizing or the contextualizing need for photographs to really explain anything or to have any kind 37:20 Wes: of weight, ethical or political effect. 37:23 Erin: Right, right. It's as though the default mode of the camera is one which is anti moral. And to be put to a moral use. Photos need historical context and an overriding narrative for which they would then come in as secondary items to just furnish evidence toward an already established moral framework or position. So when we have a camera and we're taking photos of something like say we are war photographers and we're photographing people dying in front of us, something about having a camera in that moment, she would argue, justifies that position. You know, it's okay for us to be there watching people die in front of us because we're recording it. So I think this is what she talks about with the camera being a passport. And there's no moral boundary. You know, the moral boundary that might be there that might make us say, turn away from that moment is evaporated because we're a war photographer and that's what we're there to do is photograph people dying, say. So it seems almost anti moral or outside of morality entirely to be walking around with a camera. Or it may even be pro immorality. Like if we're, if we're, if we're taking a photograph of someone doing something which we might deem immoral. She says that the relationship of the person with the camera to the thing that they are photographing is one of encouragement. So the person might even be encouraged to keep going because they see that they're being photographed. And if we're going to contrast that with this idea of the preservation of nature or something which has maybe a moral weight attached to it, or a photograph which we want to serve a moral end, like showing a part of the Amazon rainforest which has been cut down, you know, taking pictures of the stumps of trees to serve a moral point, we would need a larger apparatus of narrative to even understand why that photo might be moral. I mean, maybe I'm arguing against myself because when I see that, I might be sad just seeing trees cut down. But I think Sontag would argue that one would need to have it explained to them that the Amazon is being cut down because people are, you know, whatever, building McDonald's and need. Need trees cut down in the Amazon to furnish the wood to build those McDonald's. And this is a bad thing, and here's evidence of it. And then you see the image of the Amazon cut down and you're filled with moral indignation at this image. In other words, there's a default amoral or immoral position that the camera typically has. And when put toward some kind of end, which is supposed to be propagandistic or moralistic in a sort of positive way, it needs a lot of extra help to get somebody there, to get them to a moral position, which we would consider to be on the plus side of that equation. 40:23 Wes: Yeah, you're getting at the point that she makes about the use of photographs in service of conscience and in service of political and moral feeling. And she makes this interesting point that it's different for conscience than it is for desire. So in a way, desire is ahistorical. You just need certain archetypes, like if you want to induce sexual lust, you just. There's pictures of bodies. But if you want to arouse moral feelings and historical context is very important, if you want to awaken conscience, you need a given historical situation, and the context around that has to be clear. So she brings up, for instance, the example of Civil War battlefield photographs. Not dampening enthusiasm for the war, for instance. You're not going to just produce the feeling of revulsion for the war with a photograph. There's not already the seed of that revulsion already there. Or for instance, photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one and help build up a nascent one. And so she brings up, of course, that famous picture of the Vietnamese child who's just been napalmed, that iconic picture. And that did a lot right to increase revulsion against the Vietnam War. But by contrast, the Korean. Well, actually, I think the point she makes about the Korean War was that there was no photographic record or not much. And there wasn't because the ideology did not allow that right. There was no space for that because of a pre existing ideology. So if we want to produce photographic evidence, we're doing that in the context of an ideology or in the context of a naming of an event or the context of an existing political consciousness. We're not just going to invent a political consciousness whole cloth by use of photographs. And then she goes on to talk about her own personal experience seeing Holocaust photographs and how important that was to her and life changing. I mean, that was for me, actually, as a kid too. She says it divided her life into two parts and I kind of felt the same way. But the overall point, despite that example, is that it doesn't. Right. These photographs aren't necessarily going to strengthen conscience. They can also corrupt it, anesthetize it. Because through such photographs we get this repeated exposure, we get inured, we get used to atrocities and seeing things that might have once have shocked us. The shock kind of fades. So it's really a double edged sword. She says it can deaden the conscience as much as arouse it. 43:11 Erin: She talks about the omnipresence of photographs having an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility, how we can be inured to those images. And we'll wrap up here, but in the next part, maybe we can begin by talking about what she might be implying about an ethical comportment towards photographs. Like she calls photographs themselves an ethics of seeing. They're furnishing an ethics of seeing. And I'm wondering if she is implicitly pushing back against that or showing us maybe some ways to think about how we might push back against the perhaps too transgressive mode of seeing which photographs are furnishing us with. So maybe we can dive into that at the beginning of part two. All right, thanks, Wes. 43:56 Wes: Thank you.

Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman. Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Amadeus. We just got done. Sort of are still talking about Mozart's relationship to the divine and whether or not he might be something like a Christ figure. And I just wanted to talk about Salieri's own relationship with his father. We hear that his father is a man of commerce. And so Salieri, he seems to relate to God in this way, in this economic system kind of way where every prayer should be immediately rewarded and the hard work of self denial should result in God's favor. That, you know, he's making these sort of long term investments in asceticism and self denial that should see a return through the genius that God will give him and the ability to sing to him. And so some of that seems to be a result of his relationship with his father, who is not at all interested in music. And Salieri seems to think, and even asks the priest, who we haven't even mentioned is his interlocutor through the entire film, because the whole thing is one long flashback told from Salieri's perspective. You know, wouldn't you have thought this was a sign that this miracle had happened? And the miracle, of course, is his father choking on something, probably a meatball and dropping dead. And that frees Salieri up to pursue his musical career, which his father had previously denied. So I don't know. I just. I don't know that there's. There's much to be said about this that we haven't already said. But I'm so interested in this paternal relationship with Salieri and God, Salieri and his father, of the two being so diametrically opposed to each other in one way. Well, in terms of Salieri's relationship to them, right. Like he so doesn't care for his father that he thinks of killing him off as this huge convenience. And yet he's so in love with God and with wanting to sing to God that he gives up his whole life for his love of that paternal figure. Of course, it's also about his own narcissism and self glorification and looking like a really big and important person. But I don't know, I find it really knotty and difficult to untie that twin strand of these two father figures in his life. 2:40 Wes: The two father figures being his father and the. 2:43 Erin: And God. 2:44 Wes: And God. Okay. 2:45 Erin: Yeah. 2:45 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting, he says about his father. How could I tell him what music meant to me? That's when, you know, he tells his father he wishes he could be like Mozart. And the father says, why? Do you want to be a trained monkey? You'd like me to drag you around doing tricks like a circus freak? Sam, I have a homicidal feeling. How could I tell him what music meant to me? And, yeah, music is everything. Music is a religious experience for him. It's his way of connecting to God. And so it means more than commerce or a practical profession. And the miracle is that. Yeah, the first miracle is that his father dies. And we get no sense that he's sad about his father's death or that he has any sort of familial feeling, you know, typical feeling towards his. Towards his father, any love. And it's interesting he uses that word, that little transition, you know, where it's. Do you know what happened? A miracle that occurs twice in the film. The second time is when Joseph yawns. Emperor Joseph yawns, so he says. And then. And then. Do you know what happened? A miracle. With that yawn, I saw my defeat turn into victory. Mozart was lucky the emperor yawned only once. And before that, he's really getting into the music. It's the Marriage of Figaro. So he says. The restored third act was bold, brilliant. The fourth was astounding. I saw a woman disguised in her maid's clothes, hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. There's another really great song that. That is premised on this idea. You know the song where someone puts out a classified ad to find love and it turns then the person who responds to it is his wife. 4:45 Erin: Oh, you mean if you're into peanuts in pina coladas 4:51 Wes: getting caught in the rain. Yeah. So, anyway, I don't know which one is better. Marriage of Figaro or that one. But anyway. 4:59 Erin: So, yeah, it's hard to talk about. Okay. 5:01 Wes: So offered. We hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater conferring on all who sat there perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable. Making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar. There's this really interesting juxtaposition in Salieri between his ability to appreciate the music and to feel almost gratitude towards it. To have this very, very authentic, appreciative relationship to Mozart's music and yet to have crippling envy at the same time. And you see it at various points in the film where Mozart asks him, what'd you think of that? And he responds honestly, like, it's amazing. He doesn't hide that. He doesn't try to conceal that. And as part of his revenge plan against Mozart, he can't help himself. He can't help but completely appreciate and inhabit the music and even see its kind of divine nature. Right? One observation was that it contains longing. This other observation is that it contains forgiveness another sort of divine element. He makes the immediate switch from that to his envy and desire for revenge. And the miracle, of course, it's not a religious miracle. The religious miracle in this is replaced by the miracle that serves envy or malice or the eradication of whatever gets in his way. Whatever gets in the way of his plan to make music his life. In the first case, it was his father, and now it's Mozart. His father was the impediment. Mozart is the impediment. And the miracle is the removal of that impediment. The miracle is an expression of divine authority, right? Divine power. Something that shows up in the world and breaks the rules of the laws of nature or something like that, and so forth and therefore is illustrative of God's power. The miracle is just some chance circumstance that gets rid of an obstacle. So I thought you were talking about Father. It's not like Mozart is a father figure to him exactly except insofar as he worships him as an artist and a musician. But they do certainly stand in parallel here in being these impediments to his success which he has. To which she has to remove. Very Oedipal, as they would say in the psychoanalytic community. 7:49 Erin: Right. 7:50 Wes: Kill. Kill the father. 7:51 Erin: Right. Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting idea, that. It's almost as if Salieri is so unbothered by his own father's death because God is his. It's like a case of secret parentage, right? God is his real father because he has this extra hereditary gift that doesn't seem to really come from his father. Right. It's almost this sort of switched at birth type of thing or. And, of course, Salieri's whole identity. Well, switched at birth is maybe right, because it's as if Salieri's whole identity is about actually being this secret, divine, anointed, special boy, right. Who likes himself because everybody likes him. He's following what he thinks is this divinely appointed mission. And then maybe the entrance of Mozart. I like this idea that he's almost kind of like a father figure, but maybe it's also this. He was really the one who was. You know, Salieri maybe really was his father's son all along. And it was like Mozart again, the sibling thing. Like, you know, oh, suddenly you have this. You find out God had a second family or something like that. And those kids all, you know, like, we're these super high achievers. And you previously at the very. Thinking of yourself as being at the very end of the bell curve, you know, suddenly look to your left and discover that there's a whole lot more empty space. And then that other kid from that other family way into it. 9:32 Wes: The people who this has happened to kind of. But, yeah. 9:35 Erin: Oh, gosh. 9:36 Wes: Well, not finding out they have a second family, but when the parent moves on and has another family with a different, you know, with a stepmother, and then that new family is all shiny and pretty and highly accomplished, and the one that the father left is. Is not. 9:53 Erin: Of course. Of course. Right, well. And that. That would stand to reason, especially if the first family was a. Was sort of the means by which the father established himself. Right, right. Yeah. And then. Then he gets to sort of start over with a fresher. A person he feels he deserved. I just rewatched First Wives Club, so the. 10:12 Wes: I don't think I've seen it. 10:13 Erin: Oh, my gosh. And it's like, it's good. It's one of those movies that I just. I discovered that my best friend had never seen it. And I was like, how do you even know anything about me if you've never seen this movie? It's so, so important to me. 10:27 Wes: This is from 1996. Okay. 10:29 Erin: Yeah. If you look at the cast list, you understand Keaton. 10:33 Wes: Yeah. Now I. Yeah, I'm looking at. Yeah, it makes sense. 10:37 Erin: It's kind of like the ultimate boomer movie. But I Love it so much. It has nothing to do with anything. I'm so sorry. Maybe just to switch gears a little bit. There's also a lot, I think, being said here about criticism. I mean, really, Salieri's gift is this gift of appreciation. It is like a divine appreciation that nobody else has because they're too stupid to get it. Like, Salieri is just smart enough. I mean, this is the torture, right? He's just smart enough to really get the divinity of Mozart's talent but not smart enough to produce it himself. And that's kind of the. It's kind of the critical sweet spot. You know, if Salieri wanted to become a critic, a music critic I don't know if they had those in Vienna or. 11:20 Wes: He could have been a producer, you 11:21 Erin: know, or a producer. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. 11:24 Wes: I'm gonna make you a star. That would have been the positive way to deal with the situation. 11:31 Erin: Right, right. And that, too, I think, you know, the idea of criticism, I mean, this is a thorny one too, but there's a parental kind of relationship which criticism or the role of the critic maybe reveals. Or there's a sort of similar mechanism, the role that he ends up playing with the Requiem to kind of bring out what he's not, really bringing out the best in Mozart. Mozart doesn't really need him to produce the Requiem. He doesn't. Certainly doesn't need him to produce anything of greatness. But that semi collaboration that happens at the end is a really interesting moment. But there's. There's something where the first thing I thought of, and I thought the first thing that you would. You would think of in that scene is there's something vampiric, of course, about Salieri. He really is kind of a vampire figure. And I'm sure our listeners were expecting us to say this seeing as we've talked about that vampiric mechanism of envy in other episodes. But he does seem to be sucking the life out of Mozart. And so the film doesn't seem to be very appreciative, shall we say, of the role of criticism, on the one hand. But on the other, there does seem to be this sort of lost or forgotten trajectory or abandoned, maybe, trajectory that Salieri might have had of being the person who, of course, it would just be within the court of being the champion of Mozart. The one who. And this is an important critical function, not just to criticize. Right. But to bring greatness to other people's attention. And to say, this is worth holding up, this is important. 13:07 Wes: It's an interesting Paradox. In the end. Because he wants him to produce the Requiem so he can pass it off as his own. And so he needs to keep Mozart alive long enough to do that. But he's also somehow aware that he's using this to kill Mozart. Right. Which. It's an odd way to go about killing someone. 13:29 Erin: It is, Right. 13:30 Wes: Giving them. I'm gonna psychologically torture you to death. How about that? By pretending to be your dead father and asking for this commission. Right. He's not doing anything else I. I don't know about. Right. He's not poisoning. 13:45 Erin: No. And this is. Yeah, this gets back to my opening question. Like, what is he doing here? Is he killing him? Is what is really happening? 13:54 Wes: Oh, was that your. Was that what you meant by that? 13:57 Erin: A little bit. But also other things. Sorry, it's a complicated question and there are a lot of different elements to it, but I think. 14:04 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. He thinks he's killed him at the end of the film. But was that ever. Does he state. We don't. In the flashbacks, we don't really see him state that intention, do we? He wants to ruin him, but we don't. Yeah. Right. We don't ever see. Or do we. Do we say that he's right. We see the old Salieri say he wanted to kill him. But do we ever see the young Salieri say that? That's the question. 14:31 Erin: I don't think so. 14:33 Wes: Yeah. I don't remember him saying that. He wants to ruin him. He wants to get an opera passed off as his own. 14:39 Erin: The Mass passed off as his own. Yeah. And then he'll have this great joke. He does say. There is the implication somehow that Mozart will be dead and so he won't be found out. 14:50 Wes: Okay. 14:50 Erin: So that is part of it. I'm trying to find the exact moment. 14:55 Wes: So much of this is in the narrative. And the voiceover of old Salieri that does create the opportunity to wonder what's actually going on. Anyway, obviously he has ill intent and he cares about ruining Mozart. Or he doesn't. He certainly doesn't care about preserving Mozart's life except to the extent that it'll help him. 15:15 Erin: Yeah, here's the. Here's the Finish the opera. 15:18 Wes: But yeah. 15:18 Erin: The old Salieri voiceover. My plan was so simple that it terrified me. First I must get the death mass and then I must achieve his death. Achieve his death is actually a really great verb. His funeral. Imagine it. The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin. Mozart's little coffin in the Middle. And then in that silence, music. A divine music bursts out over them all. A great Mass of death. Requiem Mass for Wolfgang Mozart. Composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri. And this is where he almost does that. Hannibal Lecter, Salieri, like, you know, like he's sucking the life out of him. What sublimity. What depth. What passion in the music. Salieri has been touched. Touched by God at last. And God forced to listen. Powerless to stop it. I, for once, in the end, laughing at him. The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it. Very different when you. When you have to do it with your own hands. And so that sort of left open. I mean, this is total insanity. This is really why we, I guess, see him in the insane asylum because he otherwise seems sane. But the idea that he's pulling one over on God, like, you know, it's really funny. 16:34 Wes: But it does make it seem like killing would be a separate step. And then maybe he'd never had to do that just because Mozart did the job of dying beforehand. 16:46 Erin: Yeah, maybe. Something about embodying the father. Right. And hounding him. 16:50 Wes: Yeah, that's the impression I got, that the. That was. But it's an odd way to try to kill someone. I mean, so that does this. If we wanted evidence of a unreliable narrator in that sense, then that would be it. 17:04 Erin: Right. 17:04 Wes: He's recasting this whole project as. You know, it's not just, I'm gonna get the Requiem for myself but it's coming. And not just that I'm gonna ruin Mozart or interfere with his fortunes, but that I'm gonna. That I killed him as well. 17:21 Erin: Well. And in the end, he's the one who feels killed, in fact, because old Salieri tells the priest, he says, you're a merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. 32 years of torture of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all. So it's as if Mozart actually has sucked the life out of him. You know, there's a sort of reverse vampirism going on in that. Mozart getting the last laugh. But then Mozart outliving him and Salieri becoming sort of undead. 17:59 Wes: He does have that quality. 18:01 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 18:02 Wes: Well, we are talking about the vampiric quality. 18:05 Erin: Yeah, definitely. 18:06 Wes: In a way. 18:07 Erin: Yeah. 18:07 Wes: I see the Film, in a way, is about mediocrity. And that's. You know, it's a great scene at the end where he's. He's being wheeled out and mediocrities. I absolve you. As if he's the. As if he's the priest now. Priest of the high priest of mediocrity. The torture of being mediocre. Maybe almost being a genius, but not quite having it. How do you live with that? 18:34 Erin: That's the most compelling line in the film for me. Why did God give me the longing if he wasn't going to fulfill it? Salieri has some really twisted ideas about his relationship with God in which he's been almost, if you like, set up by God in a way. I mean, part of it is his own structure of thinking, but he's also been set up to believe that his relationship with God is one of wish fulfillment. But granted, he has a lot of really parsimonious, really false, really twisted ideas of who God is and what our relationship should be to the divine and magical thinking and narcissism and all this other stuff. But that. That's the one really unanswerable question I think, that. That he asks in the film is why do I have the longing? And with that, I think, implicated in that is the just enough talent to know where you aren't. And that, I think, is a really torturous thing about being human. I think we all understand this on. On a certain level. Like on. On a level that maybe isn't still close to Salieri's. 19:48 Wes: But we didn't write 40. 40 operas. 19:51 Erin: Right, right, right. Or really understand and study and give up so much. 19:58 Wes: Right, but that's the. In a way, that's the answer to the why be given this longing if he's not going to be able to fulfill it? And the answer, in a way, is that he wants it too much. And Mozart is sort of the poster boy for not wanting it too much. And the longing goes into the art object and into what he creates, rather than stifling the act of creation itself. 20:21 Erin: Well, yes, and as I've already suggested, I think there's very little in Salieri's when he's not talking about Mozart and the beauty of Mozart's music. There's very little in Salieri's speeches talking about his own relationship to music that isn't actually just about status and wanting to be. Wanting to be the greatest. Wanting to get all the gold stars and be the smartest boy in school. And he's at the top of the heap and everybody likes him and all his teachers love him. And then of course, this exchange student comes in who's doing high level calculus in his head in the third grade and just ruining his life. Right. So in a way, it's. He deserves it, but that, you know, I wanted to just talk about that a bit and that relationship to the other members of the court and the fact that Salieri, when he's asked whether the opera that they're commissioning, for instance, should be in German or Italian, Salieri won't offer an opinion. He doesn't. When solicited for these types of musical opinions, he offers a political answer designed to keep him in with everybody else. So he's really good at being an operator. He's really good at keeping his post and being in this really cozy and obviously extremely wealthy position. He wants everybody to love him and to think that he's great and that he's this beloved son of God. And he has this obviously tremendous admiration for Mozart, but for him, the relationship with music seems really tied up in politics. And then we see Mozart's own relationship to politics on scales both big and small, and how inept he really is at controlling himself to get along in order to make any money. Like he has no understanding of how to deal with people. And he's also not interested in the political in his work, which is a point made when they talk about the Marriage of Figaro being banned, which is kind of an interesting scene we could go to. 22:11 Wes: Sure. 22:12 Erin: The emperor confronts him about how the Marriage of Figaro shouldn't be staged. It stirs up hatred between the classes, I think the emperor says. And Mozart says, well, I hate politics. You know, this isn't about politics. And then he goes into just the structure of this one musical piece that he really loves and where he keeps adding more and more people into the harmony and ultimately says that he sustains this for 20 minutes of continuous music. And he says, in a play, if more than one person speaks at once, it's just noise. But with opera, with music, you can have 20 individuals all talking at the same time. And it's not noise, it's perfect harmony. 22:52 Wes: Yeah. 22:53 Erin: So I love this idea. Like the idea that music is about harmony, not political strife, not about separating people. But of course, Joseph is talking about his sister Antoinette and how things are going really badly for her. So there's also something to be said for not inciting any more political strife than what he wants to deal with. 23:14 Wes: Get my sister killed. 23:15 Erin: Right, right. Salieri is Writing operas with the themes that the academy approves in air quotes. Academy approves, you know, these mythological subjects which are extra historical, which don't really get into the weeds. And Mozart is about the personal and the ignoring kind of the political in a way, or being oblivious to it. 23:38 Wes: Yeah. Joseph pivots from the whole politics objection to the idea that this is rubbish or vulgar. 23:47 Erin: Right. 23:47 Wes: He says, Mozart, music is not the issue here. This is in response to the whole 20 individuals in harmony. Music is not the issue here. No one doubts your talent. It's your literary judgment that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, it would still remain a vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on so much rubbish? Surely you can choose more elevated themes. Right. And this is sort of in line with Salieri's idea that Mozart himself ought to be more elevated as a character since his music is. Right. So the content of Mozart's character and also the content of, you know, the libretto or the play it's based on should reflect the beauty of the music. Mozart says elevated. What does that mean, elevated? I am fed up to the teeth with these elevated things. Old dead legends. Why must we go on forever writing of gods and legends? And Salieri says, because they do. They go on forever. 24:44 Erin: That's van Swieten. 24:45 Wes: That's not Salieri. 24:46 Erin: Yeah, that's right. And Joseph. Yeah, and Joseph also isn't the one who says this. This thing about the vulgar farce. That's van Swieten, too. 24:55 Wes: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's an error. I created a transcript using AI and I had to get speaker attributions. I had to get it to guess them. And for the most part, it did a good job. But. Yeah, it did. 25:08 Erin: Really. 25:08 Wes: All right. 25:09 Erin: Yeah. 25:09 Wes: So. Yeah. So they represent the eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us, Mozart, you and me, just the same as His Majesty. Rejection of the elevated theme in favor of, you know, what's going on in the Marriage of Figaro, which is something more, I guess you put it, it's more personal. 25:25 Erin: Yes, I suppose, because Don Giovanni, the reading of Don Giovanni. Yeah. 25:30 Wes: Oh, is this Don Giovanni? 25:31 Erin: Sorry, no, no, this is Marriage of Figaro. But I just mean in general, in Mozart's work, it seems that he wants or he includes or values a personal connection in the material. You can argue here. Well, he's sort of about farce and he's a farcical character, so perhaps that's the personal element that he connects with. But I'm. The Salieri interpretation of Don Giovanni as being a Very personal statement about his father that. That must be characterizing all of Mozart's work. And there must be something in this that's really speaking to him that he really loves, which he kind of indicates in his description of the scene that he read. So maybe not personal, but just. He likes it. He thinks this is something he can work with. 26:15 Wes: There's more, maybe, about human relationships. Right. It's a very. The way it's portrayed by Salieri. The relationship between the husband and the wife, for instance. Or Mozart himself gives us an account of the way it begins with the measuring for what, the bridal bed. 26:33 Erin: Yes. 26:33 Wes: Yeah. It's more involved in direct human concerns. It's more down to earth than just mythology that turns out to be actually a very good vehicle for the sublime. Right. For longing, unfulfilled longing. And the things that Salieri appreciates. You don't need the elevated themes to get the elevation, let's say. The content doesn't have to reflect that. 26:57 Erin: Yeah. And that seems to me a really good and important element of how the film understands art overall. And just Mozart as an artist. I think it's really smart about what really excites artists and how maybe how Salieri is lacking in ways which he doesn't even appreciate. He's very much coloring within the lines throughout his career. And this doesn't seem to be even a question for him of what he really connects with, what he really wants to be writing about. You know, that doesn't seem to cross his mind at all. Is there something big that we're missing here? I guess we haven't really talked about Stanzi much. 27:35 Wes: Good old Stanzi. 27:37 Erin: She's. She's kind of. Kind of great. Poor woman had to deal with a lot. Oh, I know. The too many notes idea, too. We should really get to. I wanted to talk about that, actually, in relationship to this whole criticism thing. Right. You know, this idea. You could only hear so much at once. 27:57 Wes: Yeah. So it's Orsini Rosenberg who brings this up earlier. Right. So calls his piece tiresome. And let's see. A young man trying to impress beyond his abilities. Too much spice, too many notes. The way Salieri characterizes us later on. This is the premiere of the Abduction, he says, showing off like the greedy songbird that she was, he's talking about is the woman he's into. Ten minutes of ghastly scales. Arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground. And then he's worried about the fact that Mozart slept with Her. And then when we get Joseph's reaction, it's good. Of course, now and then. Just now and then it seemed to touch. And then Orsini Rosenberg eventually fills it in, you know, with the whole. Too many notes. Very well put. Too many notes, Mozart. I don't understand. There are just as many notes as I required, neither more nor less. Joseph, my dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in an evening. And then he asks Salieri if he's right and then Salieri agrees. So this is one of those times when Salieri is, in fact, not honest. And Mozart said, this is absurd. Later on, Salieri. Yeah. As you pointed out, casts that in terms of the fact that Joseph is easily bored. He doesn't. What is it? The royal attention. 29:23 Erin: Too many demands on the royal ear. 29:26 Wes: Royal ear, yeah. Yeah. So Salieri understands that. Yeah. This is really a matter of their inability to appreciate. Not anything that Mozart's doing wrong. 29:39 Erin: Yeah, the too many notes idea. I suppose it's suggestive of restraint or keeping things simple. You know, Joseph is accused by Salieri of needing. Or maybe the people of Vienna, or the court, rather, of Vienna of needing to have that bang at the end of the song. So everyone knows when to clap. Or maybe that's his friend from the lower. The theater who makes that observation. I can't quite remember now. But, you know, at first we think that this is about them just being stupid, like musically stupid or Mozart being beyond all of them. But then we discover that, in fact, the common people are really into Mozart and there's a sort of, like, class distinction being made, which is odd. So the court of Vienna is more like the. A parallel would be something like the French Academy and then, say, the Impressionists rebelling against that and portraying the common people and being interested in more lowly subjects. You know, ordinary people as subjects rather than classical myth and great heroes of history and things like that. And so something about Mozart's subject and his interest in the common people seems also to be borne out by his appreciation by the common people that we see later in the film. Though I'm not sure I buy that. I mean, he did die poor. But anyway, you know, as we close 31:05 Wes: out here, a little history. What? Yeah. Why did he die poor? Too many notes. 31:13 Erin: I'm not 100% sure. I haven't refreshed my memory on that. I mean, he wasn't. He did feel that Salieri was pushing him out of certain things. That there was a cabal at court of people who were pushing him out of appointments. He was passed over to be the music teacher of that woman. I forget who it was. Joseph's niece. Maybe he was passed over to be her teacher. I don't think there was really a guy with a lot of dogs that he had to resort to, but certainly he was passed over for things as a result of jealousy. I don't know how much of that. I mean, Mozart was in the letters, a really intelligent and sensitive guy. So I doubt that he had the sort of social problems that Mozart seems to have in the film of not being able to get along with people at all and being kind of a jerk. So I'm not quite sure. Well, Wes, it's time to leave genius behind and go back to mediocrity. Is that. Is that what we're all doing? This is one of my favorite movies. I love this movie so much. So I hope you enjoyed it and weren't put off by the length. I know you were. I made you watch the Director's cut. 32:21 Wes: No, I actually. No, no, I enjoyed it. 32:25 Erin: Oh, great. Great. Yeah. The stagings of the opera scenes are also just incredible. I love the Queen of the Night. 32:32 Wes: Yeah, it's really funny. 32:33 Erin: Twyla Tharp staged it, so. All right, thank you. 32:37 Wes: Thank you.

If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician’s relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long-term loan of musical talent. Salieri’s economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral—he’s ”a giggling, dirty creature” in the words of Salieri—but has received the equivalent of a billion-dollar loan. Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin discuss the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman. Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician's relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long term loan of musical talent. Salieri's economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral. He's a giggling dirty creature, in the words of Salieri, but has received the equivalent of a billion dollar loan. Are Mozart's gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri's design which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Today we're discussing the 1984 film Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, do you think that Salieri murdered Mozart? 1:17 Wes: Are we talking historically or are we talking within the world of the film? 1:24 Erin: Let's say both. 1:25 Wes: Well, historically, as far as I know, it's very inaccurate. Yeah, Salieri was very successful. And there's no evidence he was worried about Mozart. 1:34 Erin: Well, there's a little evidence. 1:36 Wes: Okay, all right, well, you have to tell me about it. So within the world of the film, is he an unreliable narrator? That really honestly didn't occur to me, but I guess it's possible. What do you think? 1:47 Erin: Well, his being an unreliable narrator or. 1:50 Wes: Yeah, within the world of the film, did he not kill Mozart? I mean, is there a possibility he's misreporting? 1:57 Erin: I think so. The one scene that really makes me think directly about that dynamic of this unreliable narration is actually after Salieri's opera when Mozart comes down and gives his non compliment compliments to Salieri, which I find really painful. And it occurred to me as I was watching that maybe this was something Salieri's sort of impression of what Mozart said to him, that maybe Mozart was actually giving him real compliments, in other words, and Salieri was remembering it as this cruel mockery. Like when one hears such sounds, what can one think but Salieri or something like that. He didn't know such music was possible. And that was just a moment where I thought, well, that's really kind of a matter of perception on Salieri's part. And it just reminded me that we are getting all of this filtered through his perspective. And what else might he have misinterpreted, exaggerated? I'm not saying that that is either of those things, but it could be. I mean, Mozart himself thought that he was poisoned at the end of his life speech. Yeah. Which gave rise to the theory that Salieri had poisoned him because they were competitors. And Mozart did think that Salieri had iced him out of certain positions. Talked badly about him, though. Salieri was really well loved. He was the teacher of, among others, Mozart's own son. So presumably there was no ill will there. But Beethoven was a good friend of Beethoven's, actually, which is not an easy thing to be good friends with Beethoven. 3:38 Wes: What did you say? I know it's more than deafness probably, but. 3:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah, just a really kind of unpleasant guy. There's a list in this article I gave you I really like and listeners will really enjoy this. Albert Borowitz, who was kind of a true crime expert, wrote lots of books about crime. He has this article from the 70s called Salieri and the Murder of Mozart. And this predates the Shaffer play by a couple of years. So it doesn't get into that. You know, maybe it even kind of precipitated that cultural moment of everyone being obsessed with Mozart again. But he gives a really great outline of the cultural milieu of Mozart and Salieri, what we actually know from the record, from letters, and then how the story of Salieri poisoning Mozart ended up kind of blowing up into this urban myth. And then Pushkin. 4:33 Wes: Did it not start with Pushkin's? 4:35 Erin: No, it was in the ether before that. 4:37 Wes: Mozart and Salieri. 4:38 Erin: Okay, yeah, it was in the ether before that. And then Pushkin took it and ran with it. And then of course, that play was the basis of Amadeus, this article that 4:47 Wes: you're about to read from. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to read it, but I do want to read it. But yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, tell us. 4:54 Erin: He writes about what a well liked guy Salieri was. He was undoubtedly one of the leading composers of his period and an important teacher of composition, counting among his pupils Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Hummel, Süssmayr, Sechter. I don't know how to say that. And Meyerbeer. He was also a famous teacher of singing. All his students loved and respected him. Friends remembered him as generous, warm and kind hearted and even had the ability to laugh at himself, at least at his difficulties with the German language. He must have had a way with people here, Borowitz says, since he apparently established a close personal relationship with the difficult Beethoven and then he goes on to say that Mozart's son was also a student of Salieri's. And if Constanze was really that concerned about Salieri having murdered her husband, she hardly would have allowed the son to take lessons from him. But as I said, and as the article outlines, there was a little bit of rivalry between them that was recorded in the letters. And Mozart felt he had been pushed out, passed up for opportunities because of Salieri's influence. But there was a great deal of court politics going on at the time. A lot of what the film shows, actually, I think kind of accurately captures some of that. And so there's a great deal of spiritual or poetic truth about what the film captures, certainly in terms of the wider world of the court, but also really shocking and kind of unbelievable, true things. It captures almost every detail about Mozart's funeral correctly or lack thereof. Also, the Requiem was commissioned by a masked stranger who was intending to pass off the Requiem as. As his own composition. An amateur composer, not Salieri, but the exact same dynamic. And he was kind of haunting Mozart during his last days. And Mozart literally was working on the composition on his deathbed, not with Salieri, but with another composer. So, you know, there's a lot in here, actually pretty interestingly accurate. Maybe not the pink wigs and maybe not the laugh, but. 6:54 Wes: Yeah. Where did that laugh come from? Do you know? Do you know the lore of that? The lore of the laugh? 6:59 Erin: The Tom Hulce, the director you worked with that he would not name? Yeah. 7:04 Wes: Oh, wait, say more about that. 7:06 Erin: Oh, Hulce said that he based it off of a director he worked with, but wouldn't name the guy in Adam. 7:13 Wes: Yeah, okay. But yeah, he came up with that himself. Right. Although, I guess, is it a direction within the original play to laugh like that? 7:22 Erin: I don't think so. I think it was a Hulce flourish. 7:25 Wes: Yeah. So he went from being Pinto in Animal House to being Mozart. As far as I know, that was his trajectory. Quite a force of nature with that laugh. Yeah, the giggling dirty minded creature is what Salieri calls them. 7:43 Erin: I'm curious, you've seen the film before? 7:46 Wes: Yeah, I think I saw it in the theater. 7:47 Erin: In theater as a kid. 7:49 Wes: Yeah, I saw it in the theater. Or not too long after. On vhs. 7:54 Erin: Right, right. 7:55 Wes: To date myself. 7:57 Erin: Yeah, vhs. 7:58 Wes: No, I know. I know your relationship to vhs. 8:03 Erin: You're not going to get any guff from me. Are you annoyed by Mozart? You know, I feel some people have really strong reactions to Hulce's portrayal. I find him Weirdly charming, kind of adorable. 8:19 Wes: Yeah. I think I'd find it. I don't know if charming is the word. I find it entertaining. Yeah. 8:24 Erin: It's a little strong, actually. Yeah. Entertaining. Okay. That's good. 8:26 Wes: Yeah. He falls into a category that the character, as he's portrayed. I have trouble putting him into one category or the other. Is he annoying or charismatic? I think the contrast between the beauty of Mozart's music and I suppose the kind of character that we're supposed to associate with that and then the characters he's portrayed, I think that's very effective. So it's counterintuitive. And maybe like Salieri, we wish that he were a more dignified kind of person, but I guess for the most part, it's funny. I suppose I wish he were more dignified. Right. If I'd learned this about the historical Mozart, if I. I'd be. I. That's disappointing, right? 9:15 Erin: Yes. 9:16 Wes: Or would you Would. Would you mind if Mozart turned out to really be this way in real life? 9:22 Erin: No. 9:22 Wes: Why not? 9:23 Erin: Well, the way to really think of him is he was a child star. 9:27 Wes: Right? That's a good point. Yeah. 9:29 Erin: So how surprised can we really be by crude behavior? Not only that, but much mentioned in Mozart lore is his actual love of scatological humor, which is in his letters. Though another element of that, which perhaps exonerates him a little bit, is the fact that in Vienna, people were apparently obsessed with scatological humor at the time. So he is this sort of dirty little imp occasionally in the letters, but not any different from anybody else walking around Vienna. He just wasn't this sort of lofty musician priest that F. Murray Abraham's Salieri seems to be. 10:09 Wes: Yeah. Was European civilization in its kind of kindergarten phase with respect to social transgression. 10:18 Erin: I suppose. 10:19 Wes: So they hadn't yet reached the John Belushi level of sublime transgression. They were still at the scatological phase. Just come back to the Animal House reference. Is that a movie we're going to do at some point in Animal House? 10:38 Erin: I would be very surprised if we. 10:40 Wes: Were you disappointed to find out that John Belushi was a cocaine addict. All right. So, yeah. So that's interesting. I did find that out. I did a little research into how much of this was accurate, and I did find out that, yeah, he. He liked scatological references in his. In his letters. But I'm curious about what. How those looked, actually. I don't know if you've seen details of that, but specific examples. 11:07 Erin: There's a lot of Ass related stuff. 11:11 Wes: Okay. 11:12 Erin: But yeah, I mean, nothing like, I mean, it's weird, but apparently nothing beyond the pale for what the. You know, it was like everybody was obsessed with spongebob or something. It was constantly quoting spongebob and he 11:23 Wes: really, he really was a child prodigy. And when did he compose his first symphony? 11:28 Erin: I don't know, 12 months, 13 months? No, like seven. 11:31 Wes: In the womb. 11:32 Erin: Yeah. He did something at four, something else at seven. 11:36 Wes: They were trying to play him Bach in the womb. 11:40 Erin: Cause they didn't have baby Mozart yet. 11:44 Wes: They heard Mozart coming back out. 11:46 Erin: Yeah. Baby Palestrina. Hildegard of Bingen. The child star element and the sort of arrested development quality I think actually works really well. It was funny. I was with a friend last week and I was asking her about the desert island disc selections that she would choose and talking about how, oh, it's always so easy. It's easy to pick your number one choice. The problem is when you get into the later numbers in the top 10, you know, what do you save and what don't you save? I knew that her top choice was going to be the Mozart piano sonatas. And mine was, was Judy at Carnegie Hall. And I just suddenly made the connection in my head between Mozart and Judy Garland. Like, oh, right, of course. You know, both child stars, you burn out quickly, you die young. 12:33 Wes: Right. 12:34 Erin: Both geniuses. Once in a. Once in a century, perhaps more talents. Both with really strange and difficult relationships to authority. Though that's something I want to talk about with Salieri too. I really love the flashbacks at the beginning when Salieri, who looks so much older than Mozart throughout the film is a little boy hearing of Mozart, an even younger little boy becoming famous and hearing of him. And they're both wearing blindfolds in the two parallel childhood scenes. Mozart blindfolded as he's playing the piano, this little tiny, maybe four or five year old boy, and Salieri blindfolded, playing blind man's buff in the streets with other kids at maybe 12. So not too much of an age difference between them. And so they're sort of peers or siblings vying for a parent's affection and attention. Or Salieri is vying for it anyway. But I really loved that parallel. 13:30 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting because in a way the suggestion is that Mozart has been corrupted by being a child star. Oh, yeah. And he was taken by his father around Europe. Right. For tours and to show his tricks. 13:45 Erin: Yeah. With his sister Nannerl, in certain ways, equally gifted as a prodigy. 13:50 Wes: Okay. 13:51 Erin: Yeah. 13:51 Wes: You know, in one Sense, he's corrupted by that. Or less mature. But in another sense, he has music in his bones in a way that Salieri can never have because it's almost like a cradle language. I'm assuming Salieri probably started out young, too, but we get this impression that, yeah, Mozart is effortlessly musical. It's part of his character. It's part of his freedom being in essence. And because of that, he doesn't have to try that hard, almost. That's the way it seems. At least everything comes effortlessly. He can play from memory anything he's heard. Therefore, he gets to be in a world that's completely a world of play, as opposed to seriousness and difficult effort. And so the playfulness comes out in his character is just immaturity. 14:43 Erin: We could argue that that's a criticism we could levy against the film. We do see him writing at the pool table. Lorl, A very young Cynthia Nixon reports back to Salieri that Mozart writes all night long and he is engaged in a lot of effort. I do wonder if the film makes it seem too easy in a sort of unrealistic way. 15:07 Wes: Yeah, he works constantly. We get the idea he works constant, but he's not revising, for instance, manuscripts. It's not, ooh, I wonder what. He's just taking his genius and putting it down on the page, which takes hours and hours and hours. But, yeah, I think the film does a good job of showing both those aspects, actually. You know, the amount of labor involved, but also the lack of agonizing and worry and concern that someone like Salieri in the film would have about. Is this the right phrase or. 15:39 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It seems he's taking a sort of. I think maybe even. Maybe even Salieri uses this phrase at some point, but taking divine dictation or something like that. 15:50 Wes: Yeah. Okay. 15:51 Erin: Salieri seems to be doing that, too, when he's composing the welcome march for Mozart and has the crucifix over the piano as he's working it out and then says, grazie, signore, you know. 16:04 Wes: Yeah. 16:05 Erin: And then, of course, he'll return to the crucifix angrily later and sarcastically say, grazie, signore after Mozart has embarrassed him by improving on the march in front of Salieri and the other people in the room, including the emperor. You know, there's this interesting problem that Salieri seems to have almost as a result of his deep understanding of music and his ability to really see these structures and the difficulty so intensely. I don't know what one would call that other than, say, a problem with embodiment or Something he sees Mozart as this pure vessel for this divine dictation. Just this spirit of God walking with this angel of God being given, flesh walking around. And the element of collaboration or of the idea that there is a tremendous amount of, say, mediation or it seems that Salieri is just externalizing. It seems as if he's skipping some sort of step of embodiment. Like we can connect artistic inspiration back to God if we're believers or to the Holy Spirit because ultimately God made us. But any inspiration is also kind of the result of our own gifts and what use we put them to and what's being channeled and what's been properly developed in us and all of these other factors that have to deal really intensely with how we are collaborating with that kind of inspiration. And it seems like there's just this idea in Salieri that Mozart is just a vessel. And when he sees the incarnational reality of him, Salieri is so disillusioned because he doesn't somehow understand humanity in a really fundamental way which, of course means that he's never going to be a great musician by default. Right? Because he doesn't understand that embodiment element, that incarnational, if you like, element which, you know, I think there are a lot of parallels being made sort of winkingly between Mozart and Christ throughout the film. But, yeah, that incarnation, I don't know how else to put it. It's a sort of weird thing because it's about inspiration rather than anything related to morality or something else which we might tie more distinctly to a kind of embodiment. 18:27 Wes: Well, this is, you know, it's the old question of can we separate the artist from their art? And in this case, he seems to think that the character of the Creator ought to be reflected in the character of the thing produced. Or rather, it's the other way around. So if what Mozart is producing is beautiful, why wouldn't he, as a character, be. Why wouldn't his character be beautiful, which is to say, somehow morally upstanding? And that's the kind of bargain that Salieri, early on thinks he's made with God. It's interesting because he will. He will call Mozart the voice of God which is a very different relationship to God than what he imagines himself having early on, where he says, lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world. Make me immortal after I die. Let people speak my name with love for what I wrote. In return I will give you my chastity, my Industry, my deepest humility every hour of my life. Amen. That's a kind of bargain where he's going to be ascetic, morally upright, in return for a gift that he can use to glorify himself, both himself and God. It's not like he produces beautiful things because he's morally upright. It's just he's gonna give me the talent, and then I'll trade you back the moral uprightness. But in the case of Mozart, he has this expectation that a vulgar person couldn't possibly produce such beautiful things, which, you know, I'm kind of sympathetic on one level. We know it's not true. Of course we know that the character of artists and thinkers and all kinds of brilliant people, they're not necessarily such great people. Even if what they're producing is great. It doesn't work that way. But somehow it's hard to give up that wish or that expectation. I don't know what you call it, that one would match the other. And why is that? Why do we. Well, I don't know if you feel the same way, but if you do, why do we have that need for them to line up? 20:46 Erin: Well, I'm certain I do have that need when it comes to certain people. For me, in this film, it seems important or maybe even essential that Mozart, for instance, be obsessed with scatological humor or be kind of a philanderer or be this person who's burning really brightly, living really intensely because he needs to be a kind of a rebuke to Salieri, though Salieri is not really understanding what that rebuke means or what it constitutes. I think that this bargain that you're talking about, which is. Which is a great word for Salieri and this. This divine accounting that he seems to be doing, it's very much, of course, the result of magical thinking. It's very similar to music itself, which is, of course, the most abstract art form, which is, I think, the reason why it's so closely identified with. With the divine or why music can be called, you know, the Voice of God or something like that by Salieri. Mozart's down and dirty. Mozart's in the weeds. Mozart gets what it is to be human. And it's like Salieri only has half of himself. It's not really maternal or paternal thing, but it's as if Salieri only has one parent, one father figure, one divine, authoritarian father figure. And we see throughout, you know, Salieri is really about conforming with authority. Doesn't challenge authority at all until he. He breaks with God. And he's still really interested in being in with the authority figures around him at the court. But it's as if he just has this one parental element in him. And he's this. This angel who turns bad. This thing which is not fully incarnated. And Mozart has. He has another interesting relationship with. With a paternal figure, an authority figure, but one of rebellion. He has, obviously, the love of structure and complexity and authority and divinity implied in his great understanding of music. But then he's also fully human. He's about the personal. He's about pleasure. All of the messy complexity of life, cruelty, beauty, just everything mixed together. And so it seems to me that he's flawed. Of course, he's flawed in these ways which we might find annoying or even perverse. But that seems evidence to me of him being a sort of a full person in a way that Salieri is really not. And what Salieri is missing he just doesn't get throughout the entire. You know, he just sees it as. He's not been given, you know, a proper amount of gift in his sort of divine bank account from God. God hasn't deposited enough money in his account in this imaginary accounting system. And he thinks that all he needs is just to get more of that divine money. And really he should be looking in a kind of a different direction. I don't know if that means he should be, like, actually going out and sleeping with people or, like, drinking or having a good time. I mean, Salieri, actually. It's even noted in the. In the article that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that he didn't drink. He's Italian. He doesn't drink. 23:58 Wes: But he did have eight. Eight kids and a mistress. 24:02 Erin: There you go. There you go. That's a lot better than the. Than the. The filmic Salieri. But, yeah, you know what I mean? Like, it's. It's. That seems to be the problem. He doesn't really understand people or life or fun or anything that has to do with real life. You can't really live like a priest. And I don't mean that you. You have to go out and have a lot of sex and get drunk and stuff like that. But I also don't think that you can live a fully ascetic life. And. Well, unless you're Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dickinson or something like, I don't know, like you'd have to have a really exceptionally strange personality in order to. In order to live that way and 24:44 Wes: still produce works of genius to live ascetically and still. 24:48 Erin: Yeah, I think so, yeah, I mean, in certain instances, I know it can actually maybe even be a benefit. But I'd say in Salieri's case, there's something. There's a chip missing there. 25:01 Wes: Yeah. It's kind of an interesting contrast, maybe between an obsessional character and a perverse character. Notably, he doesn't ask to be the voice of God. Right. The thing that he calls Mozart over and over again. He asks to be given a voice that can be used to glorify God, but not to have God speak through him, maybe, if I'm getting that right. And so it's not in the mode of inspiration or being taken over by the muse or something like that. It's more about work ethic and discipline. And that's where the asceticism, the moral asceticism fits in. You can't be creative unless all your energies are directed away from the lower things in life towards this one thing. So maybe this is. You know, I had this thought actually when I was watching the film. It's a comparison I don't think you're going to like, between Cuckoo's Nest and this, where it's like Nurse Ratched versus. 26:02 Erin: Oh, sure. 26:03 Wes: But it's. Yeah. So it's a little bit of a Dionysus, maybe, versus the Apollonian here, or it's not quite it, but, you know, the Dionysian versus someone who's much more rigid. 26:17 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's what I'm talking about with the fact that Salieri seems to have one parent and Mozart really two. I mean, it's sneaky, but he seems to be actually the fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian because he's. Because as a great musician, that Apollonian element is already baked in. Right. Those structures are already there. 26:38 Wes: Yeah. There's a lot of formal complexity and structures, as you put it. But, I mean, as a character, though, he does seem to me to be lopsided, like the Only. When does he seem like an adult? I mean, there's an adult like feeling to him when he's composing, when he's at the pool table you know, concentrating, or at the end of the film, when he's involved in creating music. In a way, a serious side of him does seem to come out in those. In those moments, because he's engaged with sublimity and this almost maybe a worshipful quality, but there's an intensity about it. But, yeah, I don't think of him. There's no maturity to him at any other point, is there? 27:20 Erin: No, I Don't think so. That's another interesting element of genius we might hone in on. Or specifically this child star kind of genius where Mozart really seems, I mean, you know, of course whenever I say that, I mean the film Mozart, he really needs a keeper. It seems he needs someone to take care of him, someone to be the responsible one. He needs some guardrail and that, you know, like Stanzi working to make sure that he's actually getting money or, you know, it seems this, this relationship with the parent and the child who is a child star, is one which hobbles their ability to really be a grown up for the rest of their lives. And yet as you've already said, the parents determination to imbue the child with all of these gifts puts them in this other category where they can't really function in the real world, where they are not really part of normal human society. You know, they become a performing monkey, as Salieri's father says. You know, they become in essence a freak. Of course they have these, these freakish gifts already that are then also properly developed and properly channeled. It's like they're, they're lopsided or they're, you know, one can imagine that they're almost like top heavy or they have these. If we're to sort externalize it in a kind of metaphor, part of their body is abnormally huge and they need like some apparatus to get themselves around because they have some big head and so they keep falling over and they need somebody to hold them up or something. You know, they have that kind of dynamic going on inside them and that seems to be part of what genius is or how one part of you is this freakish part. And then maybe the rest of you is underdeveloped or, or maybe even normal, but the freakish part of you is so freakish that you need some support, somebody to take care of, someone to help you navigate the world. 29:11 Wes: Yeah. And I think maybe part of the disappointment of finding out that the beauty of the artistic product is not reflected in the character of the creator. Right. Because immaturity, there's an incompleteness about immaturity. And the exceptional art object is there's a completeness to it. And maybe the wish is that we think that the creative process should be redemptive, right? To be able to be creative like that. In a way that's sort of one of the things that gives life meaning. It should be deep and transformative and make us better people and improve our quality of life overall, not just give us this thing to do when we're not drinking ourselves to death or something like that, or when. 30:01 Erin: Which you can only do when you're drinking yourself to death. 30:03 Wes: Right, right. It really is kind of a paradox, and I think Jung pointed this out very well. He makes some point, the effect that if all your energy is going into creativity, if you become obsessed with that in a way, it can lead to self neglect. There's a kind of narcissistic quality to it. And as we know, Narcissus becomes fascinated with his own image to the point of self neglect and dies looking at himself in the pool. He can't attend to the real self because he's attending to this imaginary, more perfect self. Art is. And other high cultural activities, thinking and art and all sorts of things. I mean, they're supposed to reflect a cultural maturity, I think, and supposed to reflect something that's deeply important in life, and yet they can be accompanied by self destruction, self destructiveness, self neglect. 31:02 Erin: You're making me think of. You know, I'm probably like such a. Such a Salieri, certainly in the magical thinking department, but you're making me remember a time in my life where I thought that if I wasn't. If things weren't going well for me spiritually, that I wouldn't be able to write anything that, like, if I were not doing well, like, doing all the things I needed to do spiritually, that. That kind of channel, you know, that I, like, wasn't. I wouldn't be open to inspiration if I wasn't open to grace, because these things seemed to me so twinned together. And then I. I was obviously, you know, disabused of that notion when I must have been depressed or something, and. And, like, not maybe not going to Mass or something like that, and was then able to write something I thought was really good or something like that. Right. So it's like, wait a minute, that can't work. I mean, and like, I knew logically also that that was not the case. Like, I knew it, but there's. But still, I think when you have those religious structures in your mind, it's very, very difficult to tweeze those things out, to separate them and understand the difference between. I mean, I still don't fully understand it. Right. Like, I don't. Like, this is why I'm kind of struggling to make the distinction in Salieri's way of thinking between inspiration and grace. Sorry. This was related directly to something that you were saying then about Mozart, which now I've, like, lost the thread now that I've embarrassed myself by telling this story. But no, it's not. But yeah, we want or we think that these things should line up because it kind of doesn't make any sense unless they do. And yet we can even see that there's a way in which creativity can have nothing to do with. Even with what it in itself purports to be, which is a collaboration with something greater than yourself. It can ultimately be about going deeper into narcissism, as you're suggesting, even as it may be a work of. A work that shows some kind of deep insight, maybe about other people. Like a play. If you're writing a play. And I mean, this is just an example I could think of. And you're like putting in all these characters that are fully realized and really demonstrate a kind of deep understanding of other people. And one would think that this was a work of self forgetfulness. You can still be working on it to such an extent that it's like a narcissistic. The process of creating it is really narcissistic or something. Is that kind of what you're teasing out from Jung there? Or am I mischaracterizing it? 33:31 Wes: Yeah, I mean, speaking of. Right. You had brought up the relationship between the spiritual. Having your spiritual house in order and being able to be creative. Mozart doesn't seem to think about God at all. But Salieri is obsessed with him and also thinks that Mozart is the voice of God in a sense. So he says after looking at a score of Mozart's, he says on the page it looked like nothing. Beginning, simple, almost comic, just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns like a rusty squeeze box. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note hanging there, unh, unwavering. Until clarinet took it over. Sweetened into a phrase of such delight. This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me I was hearing the voice of God. So it's the voice of God, but in an obscene child. I guess that's the vehicle for the voice of God. How can you be as engaged with the sublime as Mozart is and just not even be thinking about God? How can you be the voice of God if God is not even on your radar? 34:51 Erin: Yeah, I really love that quote because I think it reveals so clearly the soul of Mozart's talent. But how it expresses itself in this way, which is at first seems simple, is childlike. And then it becomes plaintive and about longing and about beauty and I think that's kind of what Mozart is about. That understanding of music, as we've already said, seems to me to be the implicit understanding of God or relationship with God, such as it is in him, or such as he can understand that or that he cares about that or appreciates that. 35:30 Wes: That's very interesting. Yeah. Because Salieri will say later, all I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute. If he didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire like a lust in my body and then deny me the talent? Salieri's longing is to sing to God. But in for Mozart, the longing finds its way into the. The longing is in the music itself, which there's an implied relationship to the divine in that. So unfulfillable longing is necessarily relationship to the divine. 36:03 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That's great. I love that too, that Salieri mentions at one point that he's written 40 operas alone. It's like mute. I don't know, maybe. Maybe you weren't mute enough, but. Yeah, but that relationship to the childlike too is something I wanted to, I wanted to address because I do think that there are Christ like elements. Obviously, if Salieri is this, this priest or this monk of music and Mozart is its fullest incarnation or embodiment, then Mozart is already a sort of implied Christ figure. But I also thought of the holy fool element to his behavior. And I think that that is revealed a bit in even just in that description of Salieri's the squeeze box and the childlike quality, the simplicity that then reveals this hidden depth or that starts to gather to itself some sort of profound implication as it rolls along. The Requiem scenes too are a little reminiscent to me. Maybe this is a stretch, but it occurred to me this time a little reminiscent to me of the agony in the garden, for instance, Salieri saying he won't leave him, you know, Christ sweating blood, you know, in those moments before he's arrested, before the Passion. It's a little reminiscent of that. And of course he's working on the Mass, so one can't not think of that, that Christ like parallel anyway, Salieri kind of, kind of tending to him like one of the apostles and then eventually falling asleep, though Mozart too falls asleep. So it's obviously not a perfect parallel, but there's something of that, you know, staying up, keeping watch during the suffering and the. And in that instance, the Requiem, which is of course it's a Mass, so it's already a prayer and also the working on it for Mozart, also in that metaphor, would become a kind of prayer because Christ is in the garden praying all night. Maybe next time we can focus more on Salieri, on Salieri's relationship to his father and of the inciting miracle of his own, the miracle that allowed his musical training to begin. He calls it this. It's a big joke in the movie. It's a great sight gag. He says a miracle happened. We see his father choking and dying. Talk about some dad issues there. But anyway, so maybe in part two, we can talk a little bit more about Salieri and then also just the court and the dynamics at court and maybe some of the really interesting political arguments that are happening as well. 38:39 Wes: Okay. 38:39 Erin: All right. Thank you. 38:41 Wes: Thank you.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part six of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got done sort of. Well, almost. We're pretty much there with. Yeah, we got done with the funeral speeches. Anything more we want to say about that before we get to the killing of Cinna? 0:49 Erin: Just that if they've made it this far, I think I'm delighted to announce that I have a will here that will bequeath some public gardens to all the listeners who are still with us in part just to prove what a swell pair we are. 1:01 Wes: Right. So he does trot out the will at the end and so that seals the deal. And then the crowd goes off to riot, basically. Including. Put fire to the 75 drachmas. 1:13 Erin: That's it. Oh, yeah. How much does drachma is this? Like everybody gets in this class action suit? Everybody gets 43 cents. 1:21 Wes: Speaking of which, did I mention on one of these, the Ides of March coin by Brutus? I probably did. Do you remember that? 1:28 Erin: No. 1:28 Wes: Do you know that Brutus issued a coin commemorating the Ides of March? You're kidding. And there's quite a few of them in gold and silver, and I've seen them in at least one museum. Like at the bottom on one side of the coin there's a hat. There's like a freedom cap kind of thing with two daggers, a dagger on each side, and at the bottom it says EID MAR, abbreviated. And then you turn it over and I think it's a portrait of Brutus. It's either him or his ancestor Brutus, I forget which. But yeah. How crazy is that? 1:59 Erin: This is how you end up in Satan's mouth in Dante. 2:05 Wes: And he issued that coinage to pay his troops. There's a long period where they had to go up. Him and Cassius had to go out and conquer half the world, basically, to raise those armies. They had to go town by town all over the world that Rome had conquered and either demand their loyalty or fight them and defeat them. 2:22 Erin: Not that they wanted to, mind you, 2:24 Wes: acquire an army along the way. 2:26 Erin: Just humble Romans, right? 2:28 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus had actually had a job in the mint, basically. And so I don't know if that helped him with figuring out what coin he was going to mint with that to pay his troops, but that's pretty. It's just so nuts. 2:40 Erin: That's really nuts. 2:41 Wes: To commemorate the murder of someone who's basically a friend. Now, they had had their ups and downs of course, like Pompey killed Brutus father. I don't know if you know that. But for various. For complicated reasons, Brutus ended up on the side of Pompey during that civil war, but then ultimately switched to Caesar. And they traveled together, they. For extended periods, they traveled together on various quests. So it's a bit nuts. And there had been decades of this kind of crazy war stuff going on. It's like the. Whatever the Republic was to Brutus, it had been chaos with all this fighting and infighting for decades. 3:27 Erin: I think that did seem to be the impression that I got too, is just in reviewing this particular moment in history. The Republic was only ever. It was like the idea of the 1950s to a certain wing of the Republican Party. This version of events never existed. The glory of the Republic was just a fantasy somehow. 3:48 Wes: I mean, the murder of Caesar concealed the fate of the Republic. Right. That was the end. You know, the irony here is. Yeah. That Brutus act, instead of preserving the Republic, just made sure that that was the very end. It set in motion a kind of final reckoning, a final civil war that I think could only end with an emperor. Emperor. Sorry, was that responsive to what you were saying? 4:12 Erin: Yes. 4:15 Wes: All right, all right. So this scene with act three, scene three with Cinna, where he's murdered for his name, also in Plutarch, I think. Now I'm beginning to question everything that I think is in Plutarch. So listeners will have to take everything with a grain of salt. So I could be hallucinating it, but I'm pretty sure this is in Plutarch as well. In any case. Yeah, very important that the plebeians are indiscriminate in their violence. And then we get he's, I'm Cinna the poet. I'm Cinna the poet. Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for his bad verses. There seems to be always some kind of self deprecating reference towards bad poets in Shakespeare's plays. The idea in Nan, you know, I'm not Cinna the conspirator. It's no matter his name, Cinna pluck but his name out of his heart and turn him going. So this is almost a variation on killing Caesar's spirit. And it's too bad if we have to kill the body as well. And then on some of these other things that we've talked about with the social construction of power, where what's in a name? Right? And then Caesar's name becoming equivalent to the name King. But what's in a Role, Right. I say you're a consul, and therefore you have such and such powers. Well, it's spooky. And I was trying to associate that in our earlier discussions with the concept of superstition. I don't usually stand on ceremony, where ceremony is ambiguous, between forms of politeness and then the kind of forms that go into the making of a state, the ceremonies of a functioning government, and then between the productions of oracles, superstition. There's something spooky and superstitious about the way that power works and the way that hierarchy works. And here it's kind of reduced to its kind of absurd premise, which is that if you have a certain name, you could be just guilty by virtue of that, if your name is the same as that of the conspirator. So it's almost like acting on a form of superstition. 6:31 Erin: I mean, what's so complicated about this, as you're already suggesting, right, is that this is a sort of recapitulation of Caesar's murder. Right. So this crowd, inflamed with rage over the murder of Caesar, is now enacting something similar to what the conspirators have just done. And we also have that proleptic idea of what Caesar's name becomes in history being applied here with the name of a conspirator. And just a coincidence coming to haunt you, it seems to me, because it has elements of both sides kind of attached to it to imply something about the idea of art being apolitical, being perhaps the most dangerous position of all. Or one might get attacked for coincidence. And depending on what use the crowd wants to give to one's art, they'll just take it and run with it, and they'll murder the work in the process or something. 7:30 Wes: Yeah. There's actually an extra layer of irony which I really love, which is that tear him for his bad verses. Poets are guilty of the same sort of identification that the crowd is making here. Juliet is the sun. Right. That's the substance of metaphor, which is to make these identifications. Cinna. He dies by a variation of his own identifications. And those identifications can be suggestive. And it's the sort of things that are happening in Antony Speech and that can manipulate people into doing things. And the general role of art in culture, the ways in which art can influence people, as you point out, I think you were hinting at that it can be a potentially pernicious, dangerous force within society. Plato wanted to kick the poets out of the republic. Right. Or at least to control what they were saying because they might represent the gods as being bad people, which they were. They were bad people. He wanted a better representation of the gods so that they wouldn't corrupt people. So there's something dangerous, I think, about metaphor, and we've talked about this in our Shakespeare episode, the ways in which reasoning can be grounded in metaphor and bad reasoning especially can be grounded in metaphor because metaphors, in a way, are treated almost like little scientific models. And you can extend the metaphor and if you don't test it against reality, you can come to all sorts of absurd conclusions. So, yeah, I think there are many ways in which metaphor is a dangerous tool. Antony has just illustrated that, that this scene beautifully captures all of that. 9:13 Erin: It puts me in mind, of course, of Brutus saying, I have the same dagger for myself when it shall please my country to need my death. You know, Shakespeare's almost doing that through Cinna. He's giving the poet the same dagger. Right. And in such a way as to. It's lucky perhaps that Shakespeare has Plutarch to keep referring back to because Brutus is saying some pretty dangerous things, you know, to maybe be saying in the Globe in front of Elizabeth and. Right. All of this is also kind of covering one's bases to turn the dagger on himself and to either inflame the dramatic moment with the scene which in, for instance, in Orson Welles Mercury Theater adaptation of Caesar apparently like, brought the house down. But then again, this is in 37. Welles was using a lot of contemporary political imagery, making Brutus a sort of anti fascist. You know, Caesar was identified with Mussolini and Hitler. Rather than being killed by a mob, I think he has Cinna killed by the secret police. 10:19 Wes: Oh, yeah, that changes it. 10:21 Erin: Right. But it brought the house down in this riotous. You know, it was considered the high point of the play. In fact, there's a very famous. I think it's sort of famous. I like Jacob Landau. I don't know how well known he is at this point. Probably not very well known. But there were, you know, artworks depicting this moment in the Welles adaptation, depending on how you want to play it. It's almost a moment of comic relief or absurdity after everything. Right. Or. 10:47 Wes: I agree, yeah, yeah. 10:49 Erin: Or in the Welles adaptation, a surprising emotional high point which seems to even. Seems to have an even greater reaction than the actual meat and potatoes of this play. You know, the two speeches. 11:02 Wes: To me, it's doing at least two different things at once, which is. It's consolidating something that's really important thematically around the name. The name, Power and the name. Yeah. Caesar. Caesar's king. Yeah. Cinna versus Cinna. And then the comments on, well, the little meta commentary on bad poetry. My impression from Shakespeare, from what I've read almost every play at this point multiple times, is that there's a kind of rough and tumble relationship between audience and players and playwright. And he was acting often, I guess, maybe early on he just went. Not that we actually know, but he was probably concentrating on playwriting and letting other people do the acting. But I imagine, right, the grunts in the audience, there's always the question, are you enjoying yourselves? No, well, sorry, yeah, I'm not that great. And some of this is explicitly said, especially when there's people giving prologues or epilogues like the Tempest. I hope you've had a good time, if not, sorry about that. So, yeah, many references, I think, to. To bad poets and bad verses throughout his play, with the implication being that he might be one of those people. He might be subjecting his audience to his bad verses and they might want to tear him to pieces. Right. So it calls out this, I think, real tension in art between artist and audience, because for some reason, you know how when you go to improv and it's bad and it's just like so excruciating with stand up comedy, it's just like you almost feel like it's happening to you, like some kind of empathetic connection. But I think it can arouse a certain amount of hostility in an audience, which is strange. Right. If you go to see a bad play, you want to throw tomatoes, you want to get violent, but it should be pretty low stakes. I'm just going to try to pass some time and if it's not great, okay, it's not that great. But do you have to kill the actors? Well, but anyway, yeah, I don't know 13:20 Erin: if this is too much of a stretch, but when I think of that, when I think of tomatoes, you know, I think of the crowd at La Scala, for instance. And one of the things that these incredibly emotional and often violent crowds are responding to is a poor performance of an opera that they know well. So there's a sort of ideal in the ether of the performance, as it should be, or a singer who originated the role, who's the best, and you're not measuring up to that ideal, betraying the text somehow, the perfection contained within the material. And so I hesitated to say that because, well, that's not the case here, but it is because he's dramatizing A story everybody knows. So there's a danger, right, of this isn't, say, an original play. It is. And it is what to add in, what to take out. You know, in a way he's doing something like what a. What a great opera singer would do, which is an interpretation of pre existing material. And the extent to which he interprets it well or doesn't is going to be what he sort of lives or dies by in this, in this. Most famous of any of his stories that he treats in any of his plays. Right. This is the most famous, I mean, I think of his Harold Bloom, who said, you know, that Caesar is the most famous person that Shakespeare will ever treat in his, in his plays. I have the inherent feeling that there's something more to be said about that. But one of the things that tear him for his bad verses makes me think of is also in Brutus's speech a little earlier in the speech when he says, which I don't think we addressed directly, as he was valiant, I honor him, but as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honor for his valor and death for his ambition. 15:09 Wes: Yeah, I don't know how we missed that. 15:11 Erin: Yeah, Right. So he important. Yes. Doling out justice in accordance to his characteristics. Right. You're not, you're not a person. You're a collection of characteristics which we have to treat on an individual basis. That also reminds me of this, it reminds me of, you know, tear him for his bad verses or the coincidence incidents of having the same name. And therefore you're not really a person. You're just someone with a collection of characteristics, including a name which may or may not serve you well. And maybe something like, you know, what a playwright has to deal with. Well, this part was really good, but then this part was bad. And so we want to throw tomatoes here, but we want to, we want to clap here. He should have taken out this part from Plutarch or added in this part, you know, I, I just. This idea that Brutus is picking and choosing what to celebrate and what to. To slay. Brutus is the severest theater critic of all. 16:00 Wes: You know, he, he thrice refused the crown and he did a bad acting job. 16:04 Erin: Or did he? Yeah, right. I mean, or we're also getting. Right, we're getting a constant critical interpretation too, is another thing which we're hearing from people. We're not actually seeing what we're, what we're really seeing and what we're being told, I think are constantly Being played with here, like the will, Caesar refusing the crown. We're getting it filtered through critics. Through criticism. We don't know if Caesar has. I mean, if Cinna has bad verses. So, you know. But we're getting an instant. Probably. Right. But we're getting an instant sort of critical apparatus around him. 16:38 Wes: Shakespeare's not interested in crafting original plots, which is. It's kind of why I'm not interested in plot either, when, you know. 16:47 Erin: Same. 16:49 Wes: Yeah. In this context, if it's a Netflix series, it better have a good plot. The context where I'm interested in the poetry of it and character and all that stuff. His plots are often quite loose. And then, like with King Lear, he just took someone else's play and rewrote it, basically. 17:08 Erin: Yes. 17:09 Wes: And with all this other stuff, he's faithfully. Yeah. He's adapting historical accounts and the magic is not in the plot. 17:17 Erin: Well, as I'm sure we've said before, in the Tudor era, these were just things that people were not interested in, and they weren't interested in having some sort of Christopher Nolan style, you know, with people who have never and will never live, you know, saying absolutely absurd things. But there's this really cool twist. Yeah. I mean, it's just a different set of values, it seems. 17:39 Wes: What would Shakespeare's version of Inception be? Right. Nolan isn't. Inception is one of his. Right. 17:43 Erin: Yeah. Well, that's his best one, I think. 17:46 Wes: Can you imagine? 17:47 Erin: Oh, no, it's not. I think it's the Prestige. 17:50 Wes: But anyway, the Tempest is the closest he gets to science fiction. Right. 17:54 Erin: Yes. And I think. But I think that. I think the plot or the genius or the, you know, what Nolan does say with the things inside of other things is always happening at the line level in Shakespeare anyway. You know, know, people being mirrors of each other, people infecting each other's thoughts, you know, all of that is simply being externalized in Nolan and leaving. Leaving the character sort of empty, but. 18:19 Wes: Right, right. Yeah. Very good. Very good point. 18:22 Erin: Not to go after him. I don't mean to. He made some good movies. I just. It's not really my thing. 18:28 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think I enjoyed them, but I. Most entertainment leaves me feeling unsatisfied. 18:34 Erin: Tear Nolan for his bad films. 18:35 Wes: Yes. 18:38 Erin: They're great. They're great. 18:39 Wes: All right. What do we want to say before we conclude about these final two acts, which we knew we weren't going to spend a lot of time on, But I compared this to the point in Jaws where they go out to look for the shark. And I don't have as much interest. 18:56 Erin: Yeah, I don't either. I think it's really funny when Cassius and Brutus break up and. And then get back together. Like it's fun at the infighting that goes on and the little power games and stuff. We could spend a lot of time on that. And I don't know that we would come up with anything more interesting than simply saying, isn't this how all these things work? Everybody's getting on each other's nerves. 19:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it shows how. From some of the commentary I read, I can see that scholars and critics take these acts more seriously than I have on the current reading. So there's a lot going. You could say there's still a lot going on thematically. I suppose what we're supposed to get out of them fighting is the way in which their lofty ideals have degenerated into a power struggle. Right. That's one part of this. But that big fight in the tent, right. They really get into. 19:56 Erin: Gets ugly in a way, which is so sort of petty. And it's not even really fun. You know, they're not like brandishing great zingers at each other or anything. It's. I think it's very well done. I mean, it's very. It's interesting. 20:08 Wes: And. Yeah, and they're mad at one. Cassius wanted Brutus to pardon someone. And Brutus is saying, you didn't send the gold I needed. And is accusing Cassius of being corrupt himself. Which, again, I think all of us in Plutarch. But in the end, the way they make up, it seems like it turns out all to be a miscommunication. It all suddenly just dissolves because Cassius says, well, that messenger was a fool. How does it end? 20:39 Erin: Yeah, the messenger informed you wrong. Brutus has this whole thing that he doesn't like Cassius's methods. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty. So he needs money to be raised. But he doesn't want to do it the way Cassius. Cassius is doing it. So Cassius has to do it for him because he's too honorable. And then Brutus accuses Cassius of denying him the money or something like that. And then Cassius says, I didn't deny you the money. The messenger just informed you wrong. So that. Yeah. So the whole thing was about money being raised. Yeah. So they literally go back and forth. I denied you, not. You did. I did not. Like. It's so petty. 21:15 Wes: It's so stupid. It. Yeah, yeah. 21:18 Erin: I did send to you for certain sums of gold which you denied me. For I can raise no money by vile means. I have no ways to get money myself. I'm too pure. But you can get it, because, you know, you. You don't have my scruples. And he was but a fool that brought my answer back. So, yes, the whole thing was leaving things up to messengers, and. And in fact, what this does is presages the messenger problem, which will end in Cassius killing himself. 21:46 Wes: Right. We also get another poet. 21:48 Erin: Right. 21:49 Wes: Let me go in to see the generals. There is some grudge between them. Tis not meet they be alone. Lucilius tries to prevent him. Nothing but death shall stay me. And then he comes in and he tries to, you know, tries to kind of mediate their fight. And Cassius says, how vilely doth this cynic rhyme. 22:11 Erin: Here's a bad. 22:11 Wes: I abuse the poet. So. Yeah. What is that scene for? What should the wars do with these jigging fools? 22:22 Erin: Yeah. I mean, if Cinna is a shadow of Caesar or of Brutus, or of Brutus and Caesar, then Cinna himself also needs a shadow. He needs a rhyme. This poet says, for shame, you generals. What do you mean? Love and friends as two such men should be. For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. You know. He has his little cups. 22:47 Wes: Now that you read that out loud, that is really bad. 22:49 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a couple. It's. Yeah. So. So. 22:51 Wes: For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. Yeah. 22:54 Erin: Everybody needs their little. Everybody needs their little pair. Their little couplet. 22:59 Wes: Yeah. So the poet is coming in to try to save the day and say, I've got something to add. I'm not just useless in war. Finally, I've found a purpose. I'm going to reconcile these two great generals. We get another scene where there's another critical mistake about military planning that is really Brutus fault. Cassius has the right idea. And then he. He's quickly overruled. I mean, he gives up very quickly. It's like Cassius has learned that he's just not gonna get anywhere with Brutus. And then we get the scene, another kind of poignant scene with music. And then Caesar's ghost. So it's kind of a tender scene between him and his slave boy, I guess, is what you would call it, Right. Lucius falls asleep with the instrument in his lap. 23:53 Erin: That's right. Yeah. 23:54 Wes: I guess I'm skipping over the part where Portia. 23:58 Erin: We get the two deaths of Portia, right? 24:01 Wes: Twice. Yeah. The two reveals. 24:05 Erin: And both times, Brutus is like, oh, that's too bad. 24:09 Wes: Yeah. 24:11 Erin: Forgive me. I'm too busy screwing up massively at Philippi. 24:15 Wes: Well, I think he shows. He shows. Shows? No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead. No. You're not convinced? 24:25 Erin: I don't know. Brutus did a better job of memorializing Caesar, who he murdered, than his wife. But, yeah, it leaves me a little cold and ironic since Portia swallowed hot coals, but don't. 24:42 Wes: Humor. Yeah. So, Caesar's ghost. What do we make of that? Well, the music and. I mean, do you have anything to say about either of those? 24:51 Erin: There are lots and lots of echoes of Macbeth in here. 24:54 Wes: So what are the plays in which ghosts appear? Is it just. There's Macbeth and Caesar and Hamlet and. What else? I don't know if there's anything else. 25:04 Erin: There has to be. 25:05 Wes: Oh, Richard iii. Right. He's definitely in Richard ii. Just looking this up right now. Yeah. Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard iii. 25:15 Erin: Cymbeline. 25:16 Wes: Yeah. So that's really interesting to me that it happens so rarely in his place, I would say. I mean, it's used to good effect in Hamlet and Macbeth. Right. By the way, did you see Hamnet? 25:31 Erin: I haven't seen it yet. 25:32 Wes: Okay. That's a real tearjerker. But. But, yeah, I mean, is it being used effectively here? I mean, I hate to be a critic of good old Shakespeare. 25:45 Erin: Thy evil spirit, Brutus, to tell thee, thou shalt see me at Philippi. 25:50 Wes: I. 25:50 Erin: At Philippi. He doesn't get gray lines or anything. He's not Marley or something. 25:55 Wes: Right. I was about to say, remember me? 25:59 Erin: Your old partner? Yeah. 26:01 Wes: He could have all the winds with tongues in them speaking, you know? Really? I guess that'd be hard to pull off on the stage at the time. 26:09 Erin: Yeah. He doesn't say much. I mean, Banquo doesn't say anything in Macbeth. Right. He just shakes his gory locks at Macbeth. And, in fact, some stage adaptations don't even. They just have Macbeth responding to the empty chair. 26:22 Wes: But Macbeth is tortured with guilt, and Hamlet is tortured and Richard. So these usually happen in the context of. 26:33 Erin: That's interesting. 26:34 Wes: People racked with some interesting psychology, some sort of negative emotion, and here. Well, maybe that's the point. Maybe Brutus's kind of indifference to this is part of the point. 26:49 Erin: It's more about the haunted than the hauntee, You know, Brutus just doesn't. He shall not be moved. 27:00 Wes: Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with thee. Yeah. But other than that, it's almost like Brutus is. He's just kind of out of it. That whole scene with Lucius and the music, too, it's almost in. Like his heart is not in the project of war. Exactly. 27:17 Erin: Well, what is there for Brutus at this point? I mean, Brutus. Brutus's whole bag was opposition. Brutus needed a Caesar to rail against. 27:26 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. 27:28 Erin: And, you know, what's he going to do? I mean, he's powerless against the actual tide of the empire. You know, he's gotten rid of his personal antagonist and now dramatically, you know, he's sort of floundering. 27:43 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. I'm curious. I wonder how many people sort of know you. Yeah. Get less interested in this play, in Acts 4 and 5, like me. Is that the typical response? Or is it. Am I missing something? 27:56 Erin: It must be. 27:57 Wes: But anyway. Yeah. Do you have any final. Final words before we conclude we should 28:02 Erin: end where we began, with Antony's last words about Brutus, you know, because maybe absent Caesar and in light of, you know, when I was coming down hard on Brutus and you said, oh, you don't agree with Antony's assessment of him. Him, Maybe this. This long decline into the final. Into the final scene here at the end of Act 5, we can get here with Brutus or Antony can get here with Brutus because he's become mild in the absence of this force to fight against. Or the length of these scenes or the distance now we've traveled between Caesar's murder at the exact halfway point. Point has kind of made us remember. I don't know. It goes against. Goes against Antony's idea that the evil men do lives after them, but the good is often interred with their bones. But maybe Antony is remembering what was good about Brutus because there's sort of been enough dramaturgical time to come back around or memorialize him. Well. And he's been softened in light of the fact that he's lost in battle. And so Antony is going to give him his due. And also, the spark has gone out of his life now that Caesar is dead and his reason for living and fighting for the republic is dead, too. 29:19 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. I want to just compare what Plutarch has to say just to get an idea. Give people an idea of how Shakespeare adapted this so from the Marcus Brutus life. Because I think it ends the same way. By the way, also, Brutus's mom was a mistress of Caesar. Servilia. 29:43 Erin: No way. Yeah, that is. 29:47 Wes: And none of that of course, none of the Hamlet type of stuff exploited 29:54 Erin: well, but Bloom says that this is even more suggestive of that sort of Freudian conflict than Hamlet. Hamlet. I mean, I think I find that an absurd statement on Bloom's part, but I think it's funny that he thinks so and yet doesn't mention that fact in his essay on Julius Caesar. 30:15 Wes: Brutus's dead body was found by Antony, who commanded the richest purple mantle that he had to be thrown over it. And afterwards, the mantle being stolen, he found the thief and had him put to death. He sent the ashes of Brutus to his mother. Servilia. 30:30 Erin: Servilia is not a great name on a couple levels, but 30:36 Wes: especially if you're dating Caesar. 30:38 Erin: Yeah. I'll do anything for you. 30:43 Wes: Oh, you know what? It's in the Antony. I think it's in the Antony life, anyway. All right, that's it. 30:49 Erin: We made it. 30:50 Wes: That's the Antony. Six hours of discussing. What do you mean? 30:54 Erin: We didn't really cover the. The last two acts. 30:57 Wes: Yeah, I don't feel. I don't feel bad about that at all. 31:00 Erin: Neither do I. Neither do I. 31:02 Wes: But this was fun. All right, thank you. 31:05 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: [email protected]. 0:32 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part five of our six part series. Right. Is that right? 0:37 Erin: I thought it was part V. 0:42 Wes: Part V, Sorry. Of our six part series on Julius Caesar. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. So I think we only. How long does a play take to perform? 3 hours. 2 to 3 hours. Anyway, so we'll have a little more than doubled actual performance time. But anyway, I enjoy it. I hope the listeners enjoy it. I hope you enjoy it. So in the spirit of taking your time, we're actually going to back up a little bit. We've gotten to the cusp of Antony's entrance. But I think before that, you wanted to say something about a line a little bit earlier. Fly not, stand still, ambition's debt is paid. Which is what Brutus, in a rather naive way, says to the people who just witnessed this horrific murder. 1:28 Erin: Just as I was reviewing yesterday, that line stuck out to me. And I thought, did we give this the attention it deserves? Because I think it's an interesting idea. The sort of bank account analogy. 1:38 Wes: Right. 1:39 Erin: And if ambition implies that Caesar felt that he was above other men, or sort of more than a man setting himself above his fellow Romans, then would the debt even be paid by his murder? I mean, we're sort of going to discover that it's not that the implications of this are going to be result in a big battle. And also that Caesar isn't even really dead. He's not dead, sort of figuratively. And also his ghost will show up, of course. But I thought this was a sort of interesting framing of the murder as a mere settling of accounts or a kind of moral math that Brutus seems to want to explain away in this easy analogy that. Okay, we've taken care of it now, so it's all going to be okay. And yeah, I mean, maybe just your word, which I like quite a bit. His naivete is really on display here. But I think this kind of posture that he has going into the two speeches is illustrative of his cast of mind. You know, I think in parts past I've made reference to this idea of scale that's repeatedly invoked with Caesar. And here we have an interesting nod to that. Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure? I mean, first of all, there's this list of four thing that Anthony came, keeps doing, right? His servant comes in and gives four adjectives to Brutus and four adjectives to Caesar. And then here we have conquest, glories, triumphs, spoils. And he goes on, fare thee well, I know not, gentlemen, what you intend. Who else must be let blood, who else is rank. So my note in my edition has this interesting gloss on rank, corrupt with the second sense of grown too large and thus in need of cutting, either to release diseased blood or to reduce in size. So Antony's doing this clever thing here where we have this list which sort of contains within it all of Caesar's glory. Then this idea that it's shrunk down to just Caesar's body. And then also he, with the metaphor or with the turn of phrase, gives a nod to Brutus, as though what he's done is a sort of appropriate culling or it could be seen that way. Right? So he's being very ambiguous, I think, from the get go, even as he's seemingly straightforwardly lamenting Caesar's body. 3:59 Wes: Yeah, who else's rank is a pun on rank, as in rotten or diseased. And then who else's rank has become too powerful, right? And the idea is that Caesar's ambition and his acquisition of too much power is almost like a disease and even to the point of being unnatural, as we've said before. So bloodletting is the way to deal with this disease and also the only way to Deal with power. So that's. Yeah, it's nicely ambiguous because it leaves him uncommitted, as he is going to be uncommitted to one side or another. In a sense, through this speech, he's going to have to convince them that he's not against them and that he's. Without simply repudiating Caesar outright, which would make him look not credible. So if he were merely even just worried about his credibility and convincing these people that he's not a threat, he can't go too hard on that. I didn't care about Caesar. He can't do that. So he's got to express an appropriate amount of distress over the death of Caesar, but some curiosity about. Well, maybe there was something I didn't see that warranted this. So why don't you guys fill me in that kind of approach. 5:22 Erin: I wonder if I'm wrong to see a little bit later, no instrument of half that worth, as though your swords made rich with the most noble blood of all this world. I wonder if I'm wrong there to see some idea of ink. Right. I feel like with Caesar's blood, ink is being repeatedly invoked. And the idea that the sword is being stuck. The sword, like the pen, is being stuck in the blood. It just reminds me, with their hands being wet, he's shortly going to like, grasp all of their hands. That hasn't happened yet, right? He hasn't greeted them. No, because he just came on, you know, he'll ask them to render their bloody hands. Reminds me of Sonnet 111, the dyer's hand, where you become stained with the ink of. When you're a writer, your fingers become stained with the ink. The idea that it will shortly come up with these two competing speeches of authorship, I think is being invoked. Who is going to spin this? Who is going to write this story in a way which is satisfactory to us, the audience, to the crowd within the play? And I think that already ambition's debt is paid, which makes assumptions or sort of like closes down metaphorical interpretations or possibilities on the Brutus side is not going to be able to withstand that ambiguous meaning in Antony's turn of phrase with the excellence of his writing. W R I T I N g the situation in these incredibly rich, multivalent moments when he talks to them. So it's, you know, so I keep seeing the pen or the ink and the interpretation of that as being some sort of statement about who's going to have the upper hand rhetorically, who's going to write this in the proper way or in the acceptable way that other people will determine is the correct interpretation, regardless of the actual crime or whether or not it was justified. It's sort of about the spin or the act of playwriting itself. 7:22 Wes: Yeah, very good. In a way, it's a riposte to Cassius, even though he wasn't there for that remark, but for the remark about ages hence, the enactment, the reenactment of the scene ages hence. And again, it leaves open who that reenactment is going to cast as the villain and as the hero. And I think in Shakespeare's case, he's agnostic. The play treats this as agnostic. Was it the right thing to kill Caesar? Wasn't it? It's just treated as a problematic. It doesn't try to resolve that problematic. I think some scholars would try to come down as if he's pro Caesar, pro Brutus. I think that's a fool's errand to try to do that. But this raises the question of whose story will be told in the end. He calls them the choice and master spirits of this age. At the end of his speech, he's telling them, kill me if you need to. It would be an honorable death to die here, near Caesar. If that's what you want, just do it. Even though they've already assured him through the servant that they're not. Then he gives them this compliment, which is that they've done something which is age defining. It makes it a conquest in a way, just like one of Caesar's conquests. And that's the standard of values that elevates Caesar, right power and conquest and glory and all those things. And it offers to them the same sort of accolade. But of course, the problem is that that's the thing that they're supposed to reject. So he's complimenting them. And he's not saying, you are the defenders of liberty against the whole ethos of power and conquest. You are master spirits, which I may. You know, it's a little bit of a reach for me to read that as. But that's the way I read it. And then Brutus is such a nice guy. Beg not your death of us, Antony. We're not going to do that. Cassius wanted to kill you, not me. Our hearts, you see, not they are pitiful. And pity to the general wrong of Rome. As fires drive out fire. So pity, pity, you know, so pity for the public good had to made them pitiless towards Caesar. 9:29 Erin: I love that, you know, pity the abstract concept killed Caesar. 9:33 Wes: Yeah. 9:33 Erin: And also this. This. The splitting, I think, which I also. Again, I'm not sure if that's the right word, but the atomizing that Brutus always does between his thoughts and his body or of the parts of his body. So here, you know, his hands are stained with blood. But then it's not as in Sonnet 111, almost thence my nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Rather than taking ownership over this, it's as though he's divorcing the bloody hand from himself. He's not accepting the bloodiness of the business, even as they are dripping with this blood. And I think it's. Again, I just want to mention that there's an element of this which loses its power when we read it. It versus seeing it on stage. They literally are covered in blood. And when they shake Antony's hand, he then gets stained with the same blood. So I think the contrast between what they're saying and what it actually looks like on stage, that power is, you know, I don't want that to be lost in our conversation. 10:33 Wes: Brutus loves Caesar. When he struck him, I doubt not of your wisdom, says Antony, let each man render me his bloody hand. And then he shakes hands with each conspirator and names them by name. Which reminds me a little bit, I think. Well, when Brutus greets the conspirators in his home, doesn't he name everyone by name? And then when Caesar greets people when they go to visit them, he names everyone by name. 10:55 Erin: That's right. Yeah. I think I had that as he greets, I think as part of the list of things that united Brutus and Caesar. But then Antony does it too. So, yeah, it's a threesome. 11:07 Wes: I don't know what to make of that, but it's an interesting way to. In a way to establish trust or ingratiate himself with everyone on an individual level rather than just speaking generically to the crowd. 11:21 Erin: Well, it gives us the opportunity to hear the name Cinna, which will come up later, and which is also, of course, a great pun on sinner, which I think is part of the reason why that character in particular is. Maybe that's in Plutarch. Cinna the poet. I'm not sure. 11:36 Wes: I think it is. 11:38 Erin: Okay, well, then even more perfect. I mean, these things really write themselves. But. 11:43 Wes: Well, actually, maybe. I'm not sure, actually, now that I think about it. 11:46 Erin: But anyway, yeah, but it's also, of 11:49 Wes: course, a lot of this is in Plutarch, including the bloody hands and let's daub ourselves in blood. And then. Yeah, a lot of this. He follows it very closely. But. 11:57 Erin: Yeah, well, and the shaking hands and saying people's names, it seems to me to be redoing or a doing in a different way or doing to its full. The non oath oath scene that Brutus enacts with the conspirators early on, you know, which I was assuming was a blood oath. Right. So here it seems like that is being toyed with, ironically, that it's not their blood, but still there's some sort of blood oath being enacted here. 12:25 Wes: It's almost as if he just loses awareness. He goes off into a reverie in the movie. Marlon Brando does a good job of this. You know, just kind of drifting off into this. These comments about Caesar as if the others aren't there. I mean, ultimately Cassius is gonna say, Mark Antony, what's going on? But, you know, I did love thee, Caesar. Oh, tis true. If then thy spirit look upon us now, shall it not grieve thee dearer than my death to see thy Antony making his peace, shaking the bloody fingers of thy foe? I think, importantly, I don't think it's not pegged as an aside. Right. So we don't just get the idea that the others can't hear him, but we do get a bit of an idea that he's talking to himself absentmindedly with the others hearing this, I certainly don't think. And maybe I'm just influenced by the film rendition of this. He's not talking to them, he's talking to the body and almost losing. Losing sight of the others around him. And then he wants to ask, for reasons, Brutus kind of postpones that, says we will eventually. And then I think he sets up the funeral oration and Cassius doesn't want to let him do that, which is very correct. And then Brutus sets these conditions. You're not going to blame us. And you'll say, we, it's with our permission. And then all exit. And then he gives this more famous speech lamenting Caesar. Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth. This is around 250something in mine bleeding piece of earth. What do you make of that? That is such an odd phrase. I wonder if it would have sounded as odd to an Elizabethan. 14:10 Erin: I don't know what that's supposed to emphasize. The way in which he's been brought low in death and his oneness with humanity or with the earth. Antony, when everybody else was still there, does again, this thing with Scale, where he describes Caesar as being the stag. So it's sort of upends that. That initial image from the very beginning of the play of Caesar being a falcon here, he's the wounded one, he's the hunted one. But he says, oh, world, thou wast the forest to this heart, and this indeed, O world, the heart of thee. There's a telescopic quality to that. The whole world is just in his heart. The world was his forest to play in. But then also he has a world within himself. Hart H A R T and Hart H E A R T, of course, are being played with there as well. So now that worldness, or that sense of the whole world being contained within him, that's being turned inside out here and now he's like a clod of earth. So I'm not sure if that's supposed to signal something grand about him or something about the pathos of him being brought so low here. Probably both. 15:17 Wes: Yeah. It's a kind of recapitulation of the whole. Has all your glory and conquest come to this? And here, this great spirit is now inanimate. This use of the word earth to get at the fact of an inanimate physical body. It's ashes to ashes, dusted dust and all that. But. 15:37 Erin: But also a whole. Like a. Like a piece of earth. 15:40 Wes: Yeah. 15:40 Erin: You know, I mean, that would be capital E. Right. 15:42 Wes: But part of the world, piece of piece of earth is in the planet. 15:46 Erin: Right. 15:46 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. 15:48 Erin: I mean, I don't know if you can get to that reading, but I think it's. But since he's just been talking. 15:52 Wes: Well, yeah, it's a possible. Interesting double entendre. 15:55 Erin: Yeah, right. 15:55 Wes: That I. That hadn't occurred to me. 15:57 Erin: Well, I think the same thing is happening with, you know, the wounds where Anthony said, if I had as many eyes as he had wounds, had I as many eyes as thou hast wounds, weeping as fast as they stream forth thy blood, it would be better. It would become me better than to close in terms of friendship with thine enemies. And then here they become mouths, he says, like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips to beg the voice and utterance of my tongue. So there's also. There's a. There's like a multiplicity, multiple sets of eyes. And then it's as if their mouths crying out for justice, but then they beg the voice and utterance of my tongue. So again, it comes back to Antony. So there's this. It starts in Caesar's body, it becomes multiple, like a crowd. And Then it ends in Anthony's body. So something like that seems to be happening with this idea of scale, too, with the earth or a piece of dirt, you know, like, I don't know how to work that out exactly, but it seems that telescoping is happening here. 16:58 Wes: This wounds is mouths metaphor, by the way, is one that Shakespeare uses in several plays, including Richard iii. Henry's wounds open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh. 17:09 Erin: Oh, yeah, that's a great line. 17:11 Wes: Wow. And then it's in Macbeth as well. I was looking at AI to figure out all the places where this happens, and it didn't give me Macbeth at first. And I had said, doesn't that happen in Macbeth? Macbeth, yeah. 17:23 Erin: Isn't it that they cry for vengeance? The wounds, Duncan's wounds. 17:28 Wes: They may. There's a point. It happens in different places. There's one where Duncan's wounds speak for themselves. Do not bid me speak. See? And then speak. And then speak yourselves so that the wounds speak for themselves. But I think there's more. I think there's more places. Anyway. I just vaguely remember that. That it's in several plays that he uses this idea that I find kind of gross, actually. The ruby lips. 17:58 Erin: Right. Well, I think it's great. It's obviously quite something I was hinting at before with the Portia scene. It's also obviously quite suggestive of Caesar being made feminine by falling in this way. There's an interesting reading there, which. Which maybe is a little too obvious to go into, but the other thing it makes me think of. I'm writing a book right now, which is. A lot of it is about Tudor portraiture. And I can't not think of the rainbow portrait of Elizabeth I in which she wears a gown which has all over it human eyes and ears, which is a little creepy. You know, sort of embroidered on her. On her gown. And I think the idea is that she's. As the monarch, she sees and hears every everything or everything ultimately gets back to her in this godlike way. 18:45 Wes: And they're real eyes and ears. Right. 18:48 Erin: And I think. I think coming out, she was a cruel one. 18:51 Wes: Sorry. No, it's just a joke. My fantasy about realizing ears as if she were part of a tribe in 18:58 Erin: the heart of darkness. Yes. These are her trophies. No, I think this coming out of that same moment. I mean, 1600. Yeah. So it's literally a year later, this rainbow portrait comes out. That's nearly the same moment. Right. Because this is 1599. Caesar. I don't know. It's an interesting invocation there of this, of being covered in sense organs. 19:27 Wes: Anyway, you know, it's interesting here because it's not like the wounds speak for themselves in this case. Although he will try to display the corpse. I mean, he will display the corpse ultimately to the crowd, which is very important. Important. And another one of Brutus's mistakes to let him do that. But Caesar needs someone to speak for him. And the best that the wounds can do is to open their mouth to beg for Antony's voice. Antony must speak on Caesar's behalf. And then he works up, you know, he gets worked up into this prophecy of civil strife. So at this point, we know, you know, we kind of get a climax here where we realize, okay, you know, this is. Antony is faking it with the others. He's really out for blood. So shall in these confines with a monarch's voice, cry havoc. And let slip the dogs of war at this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men groaning for burial. Wow. Carrion men groaning for burial. Are they dead or not, Antony? They can't be rotting if they're still alive. Yeah. Carrying men groaning for burial. There's a speech that's kind of similar in Henry V. And for some reason I would always get this mixed up. And when I hear let's slip the dogs of war, I would associate that with Henry V. But another great let's go to war, rah, rah, rah speech. We move into the speeches, right? This is where we really want to. We want to cover these wonderful funeral speeches or Brutus. One's a funeral speech and the other is like, did I do that? 21:10 Erin: Yeah. A part that's maybe easily glossed over that just makes me laugh so hard is when Brutus. So Brutus is giving one speech, but Cassius is elsewhere giving another one. We're not privy to that one. 21:22 Wes: Yeah, that's another interesting thing. 21:24 Erin: You know, Cassius, go you into the other street and part the numbers. Those that will hear me speak, let him stay here. Those that will follow Cassius, go with him. Cassius will be in ballroom B. 21:36 Wes: And they're going to be very, very different speeches because he and Cassius are so different and they have different agendas. If I were Brutus, I would not trust Cassius to be going along with his plan. I wouldn't. Cassius, in a way, has a different plan. A more realistic. 21:51 Erin: Yeah. And then we hear public reasons shall be rendered of Caesar's death. And then we get the crowd in a moment of Brutus's fantasy wish fulfillment, actually deciding, like, I'm gonna go here and listen to this one. You go there, listen to that one, and then we're gonna compare the one moment where the crowd is what Brutus would wish, some sort of logic police, and then forget it after the. That. 22:17 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus's speech, which I guess is reputed to be the rational, logical speech. Romans, countrymen and lovers, not friends, what is it for Anthony? Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ear, your ears, your ear. So hear me for my cause and be silent that you may hear and believe me for mine honor. All right, so as Anthony is listening to this, this is the little key phrase, believe me for mine honor. And then the implication. I don't know if he says it directly here, but it's said before, right? I killed Caesar for his ambition. Ambition versus honor. And as we've discussed over these parts, the question is, can we ground authority in some character trait of an individual or does it have to be grounded in institutions? Does it have to be grounded in some sort of. Of institutional or discursive process? Whatever goes on, right from our standpoint, from Brutus's standpoint in the republic, which is really more about guarding the rights of the aristocracy, but for our purposes, some sort of representative government or liberal democracy where the public good is balanced against the rights of individuals and all that good stuff. So we tend to think of authority as grounded in principles, in a constitution and a form, in a process. And here the question is, well, can it be grounded in the prowess of Caesar and his greatness, in all his glorious conquests and things like that? And that's what Brutus rejects. But when he says, believe me, for mine honor, that's a real slip. Because if he's to believed for his honor, then why shouldn't Caesar be made king for his prowess? So I just wanted to call attention to that, claiming that he loves Caesar, but he did it because he loves Rome more and he was interested in being free. By the way. Yeah, Brutus's letters that we have to Cicero are very much like this, except Brutus is not as placid. He's quite in the historical Brutus, at least as far as those letters make him look. Look, he is pretty harsh and hardcore about liberty and absolutely not compromising, not going to give the okay to Octavian, even if Octavian at that point has become an opponent of Anthony. But yeah, this focus on liberty and the public good, that is very much the historical Brutus. And then the result of that. So whether or not we see his speech is very rhetorically effective. The crowd is pretty easily won over. Let him be Caesar. Caesar's better part shall be crowned in Brutus. So, again, the really anachronistic double entendre on Caesar as being synonymous with king, as it will later be. So let him be Caesar is almost let him be king, but in a less anachronistic, more literal sense. Is he to become. Is he just a replacement for this particular individual, which is suggestive of that previous slip where let honor but prowess be honor is honor. Prowess, prowess, honor. And I think Antony very skillfully picks up on all these things, because honor. He's going to repeat it enough times where it just looks like the same thing, the same sort of authoritarian bent, grounding in some quality of an individual as with Caesar. So Brutus betrays himself in a way, in this, and Antony seizes on it. 26:03 Erin: I think the proudest moment of my life was when I read this for the first time as a little kid and immediately was like, wait a minute. Believe me, for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe that doesn't work. I was so proud of myself for realizing that that was circular logic. 26:19 Wes: It's like when people say, trust me, 26:20 Erin: trust me, trust me. 26:22 Wes: Yeah, because you said it. I'm supposed to trust you because you said, like, you're trustworthy because you said the word trust. 26:28 Erin: And now that you're invoking trust, I feel more distrustful than ever. 26:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 26:33 Erin: Just to say when the plebeians say, let him be Caesar, and then Caesar's better parts shall be crowned in Brutus. Yeah. I love your emphasis on this idea that they're already conceptualizing the role of Caesar, but also the implication, you know, Caesar's better parts shall be crowned in Brutus. Is that murder. We call it assassination. Whatever. Whatever word you want to ascribe has made him a fitter ruler than Caesar. Right. Because he. Because he ends his speech by saying with this. I depart that as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself when I. It shall please my country to need my death. First of all, he's the judge over Caesar and himself as to whether or not he gets too big for his britches and he's going to have the wherewithal to take care of it himself if ever the need should arise. But also that there's this economy of death inherent in Brutus's action that. Like a shrub being sculpted or something. You know, the republic is ever kind of Growing out of control. And only by killing people you know, will you ensure that it stays contained and shaped in the way that you want to do. That's not a very good metaphor, but you know what I mean. Like, you're constantly hacking out the weeds. That's a better one. And this ideal of the republic is somehow only sustained through this idea of death or killing the thing which might. Which might grow too large. It's an autocratic kind of logic. No, he's going to be the one who gets his hands dirty and. And make swift work of whoever might be standing in the way according to who he thinks deserves it. 28:15 Wes: This is the problem with revolution, right? The state has become lawless, but the rebels must be lawless in order to rectify it. And then the question is whether law can be restored after a revolution, and that. The track record for that is not very good, unfortunately. But then, yeah, we get with Antony. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. It's an interesting variation on Brutus first line. So lovers gets replaced with friends, and then friends goes to the front of the line. Lovers. I don't know what Brutus means by lovers. Lovers of the country. Lovers of. It must be lovers of. 28:56 Erin: I think it just means friends. 28:58 Wes: I mean, it could be. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that occurred to me. But our contemporary association with lovers know, makes it sound weird in that context, but that's possible. But I was thinking possibly he meant love of lovers of Rome as well. But anyway, friends comes to the front of the line. Romans and countrymen go next. We remember Brutus, right? It was all about Roman identity. That's why you don't need an oath if you're Roman. Antony privileges relationships above identity, loyalty. And so I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Another great line. Wow. 29:37 Erin: And I've brought my shovel. 29:38 Wes: Yeah, he's going to be burying the Brutus and the conspirators. That's who he's going to be bearing. The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault. And grievously hath Caesar answered it here under leave of Brutus and the rest. For Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all. All honorable men. Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. Do you want to read some of this? I feel like I'm just. I think we should read all of it, but I feel guilty. If I'm going to be the one, you do a better job anyway, so. 30:16 Erin: He was my friend, faithful and just to me. But Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man. Man, I'm already being too. I'm already giving away the game here. He hath brought many captives home. 30:28 Wes: But do you use your most sarcastic voice? 30:32 Erin: Well, I want to save the sarcasm. I want to ramp up the sarcasm. 30:35 Wes: Honorable, put the honorable. Honorable man. Yeah. 30:39 Erin: Stage direction here says he hath used inverted commas with his hands. He hath brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransoms did the general coffers fill? Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man. 31:04 Wes: Good pause. Good pause. Keep going. I'm not gonna try to pronounce lupercal or no lupercal. 31:13 Erin: That is it. No, I was just wondering if. If I had something to say about that. It was pretty straightforward. You all did see that on the lupercal, I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious. And sure, he is an honorable man. 31:31 Wes: He's an honorable man. Sure, sure. 31:33 Erin: I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause. What cause withholds you then to mourn for him? O judgment, Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason. Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it comes back to me. See, this is. I used to do dramatic readings of this for my eighth graders. Forgive me. 32:01 Wes: I'm. 32:02 Erin: I go for the obvious with. With them. 32:05 Wes: Marlon branded is a really good. Good rendition of that last part because he gets a bit verklempt, and he just kind of turns away. Bear with me. 32:12 Erin: Yeah, bear with me. 32:13 Wes: My heart is in the coffin. How does the coffin. Wait. He wasn't the godfather at that point. What am I doing? 32:21 Erin: Caesar could have been a kid. 32:22 Wes: He made him enough. He couldn't. Yeah. So great. So, yeah, he really boils the frog here and just turns it up, you know? Gradually. Gradually, the irony becomes apparent. And this transformation of the world. Word honorable, in a sense, into its opposite, or at least into something malign and maybe something synonymous with ambition. 32:49 Erin: Well, again, having the body displayed there, it's so reminiscent to me of, say, Jackie Kennedy wearing the pink suit and making sure that everybody could see what had been done to jfk, you know, so there's this, you know, what he's saying in the speech is also being bolstered visually. And so we have, again, the contrast between this ravaged corpse and this idea of honor. And it exposes, as we've already been discussing, circular logic involved in just deciding that you're honorable and therefore anything you do is going to be full of honor. Here we have the actual result of an action up against the appellation that one has given oneself. 33:33 Wes: Yeah, Brutus, in a way, this is almost like a reductio in mathematics. Reductio ad absurdum. Because Brutus's claim is, because I am honorable, what I have done must have been the right thing. Antony takes this and suggests that if it's not the right thing, then Brutus is not honorable. And then we hear about why it's not the right thing, because was it ambition? He gives some evidence that Caesar was not as ambitious as Brutus says he was. And then. So this redounds back to Brutus's supposed honor. So he approaches this more empirically. What's the evidence for or against ambition? Brutus, as we know, didn't really do that, even though. Right. He says it's. I don't. I haven't seen any true signs yet. But he's like serpent and his egg. And we gotta nip it in the bud to mix two metaphors. Nip that egg in the bud. Anyway, Brutus's idea is that he sees signs of what will inevitably develop into tyranny. And I suppose you could say you've seen ambition. The ambition is just one of the warning signs. But we don't hear him wrestle with the contrary evidence so much. It's just obvious. I think historically it is obvious. I don't think there's any question that. What was going on with Caesar, by the way? That Caesar was becoming a tyrant and the big. He crossed a huge line when he basically stripped those tribunes of their titles. That was kind of like, okay, this is like Trump not listening to the Supreme Court or something like that, or decimating some institution which was seen as inviolable from the standpoint of people who cared about the republic. 35:19 Erin: Yeah, I have to say, my hyperbolic love of Caesar is diminished of late. It doesn't seem as funny to argue for Caesar anymore. The first remark of the crowd after this long opening part of Antony's speech is, we get the stage direction. He weeps. I don't know if you have that in your edition. You know, his heart is in the coffin there with Caesar. And then the first thing that A plebeian says is me thinks there is much reason in his sayings, which is really funny. You know, the first. The first place they go is reason. Right. He's broken off to cry. 35:58 Wes: And, yeah, he's given this speech which is full of pathos and ethos. And the crowd is supposedly focusing on the rationale part, but of course they aren't because they're so fickle, right? They're just, well, let's make Brutus Caesar. Now it's like, Caesar was a tyrant. Good riddance. And now it's, oh, right, yeah, it's Brutus who's the bad guy. 36:23 Erin: That's right. Yeah. And I think while we're on the pathos ethos line, that was one of the things that I would talk about with my students is like, okay, what's the dominant appeal in Brutus speech? Is it logo or is it ethos? And ethos? On what grounds? So, yeah, I like that. Right now is the moment of highest pathos. And the crowd goes to logos. It was funny. 36:43 Wes: But yesterday, the word of Caesar might have stood against the world. Now lies he here, and none so poor to do him reverence. O masters, if I were disposed to stir your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, I should do Brutus wrong and Cassius wrong, who you all know are honorable men. 37:01 Erin: Men. 37:02 Wes: I will not do them wrong. I rather choose to wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, than I will wrong such honorable men. But there's a parchment with the seal of Caesar. I found it in his closet. Tis his will. So then this movement to the will, which is in Plutarch, Right? So it's not. I don't know. There's something anticlimactic about it for me, this whole reading of the will to kind of finally win the crowd over. Oh, he gave you his public gardens or this or that. But again, Shakespeare is following Plutarch as best he can. 37:37 Erin: What is this about, really? It's such a curious prop because, as you've been talking about Caesar's will, the other sense of will, one of many, but is the thing that maybe hangs him or the thing that condemns him. And then we have this physical document, the contents of which are unknown to us, actually. Right in the play. I mean, we have to take Anthony's word for it that his will was honorable all along, was about the people all along. Was not autocratic. Was. Whatever. I don't know. It's weird. It's like Chekhov's gun, but the opposite, because it hasn't Been hanging on the wall the whole time. It's just sort of pulled out of the back pocket. And we know we don't have a way of seeing it. We don't have any corroboration. We just have to take Antony's word for it. And really he could be pulling out a document that has nothing on it or wing dings or something. You know what I'm saying? 38:32 Wes: I do think he has it retrieved. I can't remember if that's in the Plutarch or in the play, but he sends someone to retrieve it. But the crowd can't though. But yeah, I like this double entendre and will that you're pointing out because it. Right. The gardens and whatever monies he's dispersing. That ought to be a matter of form, the governmental form and institutions working the way they should. Is it in the public good? Not a bribe from a populist autocrat. He can be an autocrat and a populist at the same time. And he was a populist. He was part of the. I think it was the populi that was the party. And Brutus was in the conservative camp. What were they called? I forget the name. But anyway, yeah, he was a populist in a sense. But it shouldn't be a matter of his will, his personal will and the largesse that he happens to want to give the people. That shouldn't be. Why? What determines what do they get? What's due to them? 39:31 Erin: Well, I just want to say one almost thinks of. Because of this heart, the stag and the idea that the world is his forest. Suddenly I'm thinking of Wyatt. Right. So anything you kill is actually the king's. Is owned by the king. And he's giving this public land to them out of his largess. And yet was it his to give? I assume it was. And yet there's something. I don't know. I'm not putting this very well or tying it together, but like there's something sort of inherently like, I'm giving you this, but also anything on it still belongs to me. And. And it's my world. You're just living in it. That kind of quality. 40:09 Wes: Right. Antony doesn't get to the will immediately. So we get some more awesome speechifying. First. See what a rent the envious Casca made. Through this the well beloved Brutus stabbed. And as he plucked his cursed steel away, mark how the blood of Caesar followed it as rushing out of doors to be resolved if Brutus so unkindly knocked. Or knocked. Wow. What an image. What a sad, sad image. For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel. Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. This was the most unkindest cut of all. Most unkindest. What? What? Shakespeare. He's trying to fill out a syllable with a double comparative, or whatever you call it. For when the noble Caesar saw him stab ingratitude more strong than traitor's arms, quite vanquished him, then burst his mighty heart, and in his mantle, muffling up his face, even at the base of Pompey's statue, which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell. Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen. Then I and you and all of us fell down, whilst bloody treason flourished over us. Oh, now you weep. And I perceive you feel the dint of pity. These are gracious drops. Kind souls. What weep you when you but behold our Caesar's vesture wounded? Look you here. Here is himself marred, as you see, with traitors. And then he uncovers the body so they just. The right. So all this is happening. You know, they can only see him covered. And I guess there's. I guess he's covered in his own toga. And then. So you can see the blood and you can see the rents. I don't know exactly how it works. 41:59 Erin: If it's just a mantle is over him. So maybe it's a mantle. Yeah. And he's sort of lifting it up and describing what he's seeing to them, maybe, and then pulls it off. That's how I imagine it. 42:12 Wes: I mean, you would have a cloak. A cloak of some sort, which is what I'm thinking the mantle is. But I don't know. I think in the movie, I might be influenced by the movie, which is kind of the way. Way that goes. And then the final thing, which I think we ought to read is maybe that last Good friend, sweet friends. Do you want to read that one? 42:31 Erin: Yeah. Before we do, I just want to say, too, that then you and I and all of us fell down. Right. Again, we have this idea that, like Caesar is all of us, or we're all contained within him. And then we get this wound and eye, tears and blood. Parallels comes to fruition here, where he's inciting the crowd to cry over the wounds by making them sort of identify with the body as if this was done, as if Brutus was their own assassin. Yeah. So then Antony goes on. Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny. They that have done this deed are honorable. What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, that made them do it. They are wise and honorable and will, no doubt with reasons answer you. I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. I am no orator, as Brutus is, but as you know me all, a plain, blunt man that love my friend and that they know full well, that gave me public leave to speak of him. 43:28 Wes: Diana, I'm just a simple southern lawyer. I don't know your big city ways. 43:41 Erin: Sorry. 43:42 Wes: Go ahead. 43:42 Erin: Pretty good. For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech to stir man's blood. I only speak. Right on, right on, right on. I tell you that which you yourselves do know. Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths, and bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus, and Brutus Antony, there. were an Antony would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar that should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. 44:15 Wes: Yeah. There's some interesting reversals here, because he. Right, we remember that he was supposed to speak for Caesar's wounds, and now they're going to speak for him. You know, it's like the whole speak for themselves thing in Macbeth. And then the other thing is we get an echo of Cassius saying, if I were Brutus, and Brutus, Cassius, I would not trust me. And here he's saying, if I were Brutus, if I were such a great orator, I'd put a tongue in every one of these wounds. 44:48 Erin: I would speak against myself better than I'm doing now to speak against him. Yeah. Brutus is like. Yeah. In the same way that Caesar is being used constantly as proxy for the whole world. He's. He's spread out. He's. You know, everyone is sort of like, imbued with the spirit of Caesar, or everybody makes up the body that is Caesar. Brutus is similarly, I think, used as this. You know, he's like this inert corpse that various people want to possess. 45:17 Wes: So it's wwbd. If I were Brutus, I wouldn't. Trust me. If I were Brutus, I would. Yeah, yeah. It's weird. Yeah, it is weird. This identity thing. 45:31 Erin: Well, there's a puppet show quality to it, you know, that's the only way I can. It's the metaphor that occurs to me who is going to. Especially because of the difficulty, as you're suggesting, of being able to pin down whether or not something is right or wrong. As we were also talking about the deep irony of this play. Of knowing what's going to happen, of having it. Having it all sort of predetermined in this way, which is almost suggestive of prophecy or the. Or the sort of rhetorical, schoolboy, rhetorical element of this as well. Arguing one side or the other. You can either hold up the little Caesar puppet or the Antony puppet and argue that side. Or you could hold up the little Brutus puppet and it almost doesn't matter which. Like, you know, there's a. There's a. That changeable quality that seems to be emphasized. Or you could put on, you know, the same toga and call yourself Brutus or Antony or Caesar. You know, there's also that, you know, maybe that's worth emphasizing too, or worth thinking about anyway. The uniform quality of the visuals in terms of the fact that they're all wearing roughly the same costume. It's very easy to costume this play. Right. I don't know if this occurred. It'd probably be difficult because of the length of the speeches. But I wonder if in repertory productions of this, if it were common for people to switch roles occasionally or. Or, oh, tonight I'll play Brutus and you play Anthony. Might have been. Yeah. This idea of somebody just taking up a body and making that speak and say what it needs to say, that idea of Antony's happening imaginatively seems to me to be a reflection of the difficulty of the entire question. 47:08 Wes: Yeah, I like that. And there's a lot of locating the argument or the speech outside of oneself. So for Brutus, it's, what did Brutus say? It's about the public good. It's about the argument. Listen to my words, not to me in particular. But then he slips and listen to the fact that I'm an honorable man. Paralipsis is the rhetorical trick where you say something by saying that you're not going to say it or hear it, and then pretend to be humble and all that. And here he locates it. He uses these hypotheticals. Well, this is what Brutus would say in a similar circumstance. I'm not going to do that. But if I were someone else, someone else would do it in my position. What does it do? It's a different way of saying it's not about me or my opinion or my sentiment. Even though I'm conveying this through all this sentiment, it's about some other and even my enemy. It's a way of getting into the point of view of the general spectator, as the British moralists would put it, to the general other that we imagine when we're deciding questions of morality or justice. So the authority isn't personal. Once again, this question about whether authority can be grounded in something personal, including power and conquest, or whether it's got to be grounded more generally and to ground it more generally in morality, we have to appeal to law, something law like. Or we have to appeal to empathy in this broad sense of a general spectator. And you can start doing that by appealing to it should be a general spectator. But you can go down that path by appealing in a dramatic way, by appealing to the very person, the point of view of the very person who you're opposing. That's often how we get to principle. Right? Would you do that? What would you think if I did that to you with the thing that you're doing to me? 49:16 Erin: That's a great point. I love that idea. 49:18 Wes: All right, that's the end of part five of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Please what do you do with podcasts now? Follow them, please. Follow us us. Maybe give us a rating, maybe even add a review on top of that. That helps us all. That helps us. But following helps a lot. If you've made it this far, immediately. Because I know you're sitting on the edge of your seat wondering what happens next? 49:47 Erin: What's going to happen next? 49:48 Wes: Who's going to win? Is it going to be an Empire or is it going to be Republic? But if not, you can wait a week and get Part six. All right, thank you, thank you. 50:04 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. Next,

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part four of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We are just getting to the end of the section with the conspirators, and I just wanted to, before we move on, draw attention to Cassius's mention of superstition, because I want to get a little bit into this. Of course they're trying to figure out how to get Caesar, and Cassius is a bit worried because whether it's Caesar. Will Caesar come out to play? Maybe not for you. He is superstitious, grown of late quite from the main opinion he held once a fantasy of dreams and ceremonies. Ceremonies I take to be like religious ceremonies or something like that, but it stands in also for ceremonies of state. And later on we're going to get Calpurnia. Calpurnia will say, I've never been one to stand on ceremony, which at that point she's basically saying she's not a superstitious person either. But of course, the way we use the phrase today, we're generally thinking in terms of being formal. So this double meaning is something that Shakespeare is going to exploit in this play, the ceremony of the state apparatus and then the kinds of ceremony involved in religion and superstition, because there's a way in which the state looks Like a form of superstition and it's being socially constructed. And that same goes here for oaths as well. The fact and speech acts, right? We say, I marry. I marry you, and therefore we are married. There's something spooky about that. It's not real, Right. That's the nature of speech acts and institutions and state institutions and society in general. They're built on these speech acts. They're socially constructed. We pretend as if saying certain things makes them true. So that parallel, I think, is very important to Shakespeare because this idea that Caesar is skeptical of superstition and religion is meant to parallel the idea that he doesn't actually. Also, he doesn't respect social convention and the institutions of the state. He's all about his own power rather than in power as it's distributed in social systems. But it will turn out right. He's generally not superstitious, but he's grown superstitious of late. And Calpurnia is quite worried as well. 2:55 Erin: That's interesting because of course, Brutus conceives of Caesar's assassination as a ceremonial sacrifice to the gods. Right. And of course, Brutus is in a way sacrificing to his family gods by killing Caesar. And also, doesn't Caesar have some sort of imagined lineage that ties him back to. I mean, I know this was later made much of, but that ties him back to the gods. That ties him back to at least Aeneas, or in his own propaganda, or his family was thought to descend from Aeneas. Maybe I could be getting this wrong, but I thought he made. 3:29 Wes: I'm not sure this sort of like 3:32 Erin: Egyptian connection to, you know, I'm divine. 3:34 Wes: I mean, the Romans in general are. What's his face? Who wrote the Aeneid? 3:39 Erin: Virgil. 3:40 Wes: Virgil. He hasn't come along yet. It'll be under the reign of Augustus. Under the reign of Augustus and the boy that he writes that. So, yeah, I don't. Is that mythology? I don't know to the extent to which Virgil invented that idea that they. 3:56 Erin: I thought it was through. It is, or it's already there through Caesar's matrilineal line. But I could be wrong about that. I'm operating off of long memory. Claimed as family, the gens Julia descended from the goddess Venus through her son Aeneas. A lineage. Lineage emphasized through the mythical. Yes. His mother's family. I was right. Wow. Also connected to Mars through Romulus. 4:18 Wes: So I wonder if Virgil's picking up on that in particular. 4:21 Erin: Oh, he must be. 4:22 Wes: Since Augustus. In order to flatter Augustus and Wasn't 4:25 Erin: it Caesar's sister's son, Augustus? So that would be further strengthening his 4:31 Wes: masterfulness nephew that he adopted as his own. 4:34 Erin: Yeah. So Brutus seems to be wanting to make this sacrifice out of respect for the state and of his, as I've already suggested, this aristocratic republicanism. But Caesar too has this connection. 4:47 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus is one to stand on ceremony. In other words, he's all about the republic. But again, the question is whether is there something spooky and superstitious about that, which is not unrelated to. Is it really envy and self interest that is hypocritically presenting itself as interest in the state, the public good? That's the question that always lingers behind altruistic motives in general, but. Or an interest in the public good. I ultimately do think that there are true altruistic motives, but I think we are always posed with that question, or at least whether our motives are mixed. But I was going to take us to scene two, but that would mean skipping the Portia scene. Did you anymore. Did you have anything to say about her being in the suburbs of his good pleasure or anything else which. I love that line. 5:40 Erin: Yeah, that's great. 5:41 Wes: Before we go to scene two, I 5:43 Erin: am interested in the gender dynamics in this play. I do think they're fascinating, but also that they're not really on the central track and therefore something we won't have much time for. But I am interested in this idea that Portia accuses Brutus of treating her in this split up way and that she seems to be recognizing in him something that he's not recognizing that he's doing, even though it's all over his speech, you know, so she, she says, I'm. I'm here for you only in these certain ways. And really I'm supposed to be your whole self. I'm supposed to be united with you in this way, which is obviously extremely post Roman that she's referencing. But so she says that as a result of this not sharing his full life, but sort of being suburb ized, she is his harlot, not his wife. I thought that was an interesting. Just an interesting mirror, you know, here is Brutus's mirror, in a way, is Portia. She's sort of presenting to him this idea that he's treating her in this split way, which is in a sense of the way that he's looking at, you know, Caesar by wanting to kill his spirit rather than his body or something like that. By breaking people up into, you know, the ways that he wants to digest them. Or view them. And the wound is really interesting in that way, too, because it prefigures, obviously, the assassination and even just the. The dream of Calpurnia. But let's. Let's skip to. 7:06 Wes: Well, let me just say, before we move on. Yeah. I don't. I guess I don't Kind of. I don't quite know what Portia is doing in the play. Like, she's there in Plutarch. So that might, by itself explain it. I don't know thematically what she's doing. I think it's supposed to enhance the tragedy of all of this because she ends up dying because of what he's doing. Right. He really is kind of the tragic protagonist here. But it also highlights something that you've pointed to, which is the way in which he is closed himself off in his rumination. He's not as integrated into a dialogue with others as you might think he would be, given his interest in the Republic and that kind of. And the political. He hasn't really quite treated this as a political matter. In other words, this deliberation about whether he's going to kill Caesar in the political context of the family. She's impacted by this. She could lose him. And he hasn't paid attention to that. So he ignores that little political unit, the family. 8:16 Erin: I like that. 8:17 Wes: Which is very against principle. So maybe I do know what it's doing in the play. 8:24 Erin: Yeah. Well, you know, she becomes. In death, too. It's interesting to see his reaction, which occurs twice, or his discussion of her death, which occurs twice, which might be an error on Shakespeare's part, or it might be doing something really wonky and interestingly. 8:39 Wes: Yeah. Didn't find it very touching in the play. That's the thing. 8:43 Erin: It's not. 8:44 Wes: Yeah, well, yeah. 8:46 Erin: I mean, it's revealing in that regard. 8:48 Wes: He was supposed to be very devastated by it, historically. 8:52 Erin: Well, Brutus, the real guy, and Brutus, this guy. 8:54 Wes: Yeah. It didn't do much for me, but. Yeah. Just quickly, do you have any ideas about the wounding of the thigh and what that's supposed to do? She's trying to prove that she is capable of hearing hard truths. Right. She's got the strength to do it. So she can withstand the wound in her thigh, therefore she can withstand anything that he would communicate to her, no matter how unpleasant or terrifying, which turns out not to be true. 9:24 Erin: Yeah. 9:24 Wes: I mean, she kills herself, but yeah. 9:27 Erin: The only wound that Brutus has been interested in prior to this, other than wounding Caesar or sacrificing Caesar, is this idea of Pricking himself metaphorically in the non oath oath scene. So Portia thinks that she's appealing to him and showing some sort of manly courage by wounding herself. And in fact, I think she's hurting her argument. Because what we'll soon see, I think, with Caesar's body and what Portia should know is that the wound is a feminine symbol. Right. Brutus is all about the sword and the manliness and steeling himself with valor, as he says. And she has wounded herself to kind of show her seriousness and show that she could be just as capable as a man of whatever she imagines he accuses her of not being able to keep a secret or something, I think is part of it. And really, she misunderstands fundamentally what Brutus idea of masculinity is about, which is about wholeness rather than being wounded. But the power of that, the power of those wounds will end up being surprising and they'll end up, you know, coming back to. Literally, to haunt Brutus. Yeah. So there's something being implied here about the wound. Symbolically, it doesn't work, but she takes this, like, extreme action to prove that she's hardcore metal. And two, I think in the Brutus column, there's a wife who's trying to warn him of something or trying to help him or trying to whatever. And then there has to be the same thing in the Caesar column. So, you know, they're the only two that get wives. So since there's a Calpurnia, there has to be a Portia. This goes toward the whole. The mirroring between Brutus and Caesar idea. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. It works for me. It's an interesting scene because of that kind of gender dynamic and what that adds, the complexity that that's going to add to Caesar's wounds and the real Roman obsession that occurs throughout the play with being manly, you know, that seems to be like a big part of Roman identity. 11:36 Wes: Yeah. So in the next scene, it's a great scene between Calpurnia and Caesar. She, of course, Right. She's just had a dream about Caesar being murdered and cried out about it. And she wants to know why he's planning to go out in light of all the bad omens. And he says basically that he always faces his fears and that they will vanish. His fears will vanish when they see him. So it's not like he needs to be afraid of his fear. The fears are afraid of him. Caesar shall forth the things that threatened me Never looked back but on my back when they shall See me the face of Caesar. They have vanished. Okay, what has threatened him so? Not his fears, exactly, but what might cause fear. And then she tells us, I never stood in ceremonies, yet now they fright me. And as I've explained, there's a real double meaning there. Between the ceremony of prophecy, the people who are telling them that there are bad omens, it's a religious ceremony of a sort. And then the ceremonies of state, right? So the external trappings of offices are ceremonies. And this is something that Shakespeare harps on in many plays. You know, the rituals of kingship and the gowns of the judge, as in King Lear, what people wear. So various other rituals and forms that go. That are kind of the glue of the. Of the state. But in this case, yeah, she's saying she herself is not one to be superstitious. But in this case, she's worried. And he has this great speech, one of my favorite metaphors. Cowards die many times before their deaths. 13:19 Erin: Yes, love it. 13:21 Wes: Valiant never taste of death but once. 13:23 Erin: I have two hearts and an exclamation point. Sorry. 13:27 Wes: Of all the wonders that I have yet heard that I yet have heard it seems to me most strange that men should fear seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. So death is inevitable. Why fear it? If you fear it, in a way, you've died spiritually already. And then, true to form, he's going to interpret one of these bad omens, the missing heart of an animal, as representing the courage it would be missing if he were to stay home. So he's really putting a good face on this. And then referring to himself in the third person, he'll say he is more dangerous than danger. This is one of the sort of absolutist moments that I've been pointing out, when what Caesar says will be done. I am Caesar. And that's all you need to know. Caesar's more dangerous than danger. Fearlessness is for Caesar what honor is for Brutus, as I've pointed out before, 14:26 Erin: the way that he works. These workarounds, though, are really interesting because for one moment, he's very, l'état, c'est moi. But the one moment where he isn't is in order to justify going out where he says these predictions are to the world in general as to Caesar. So he's like, you know, why should I be worried? Because there are plenty of people in this world. It's not like these are really about me. But of course they are about him, because he is the state, which is 14:51 Wes: a dumb thing to Say, and Calpurnia has a good relationship about all of that. Right? 14:55 Erin: Right. Right. Everybody is, including Caesar, is a fan of the great man theory of history. Unless it prevents Caesar from being seen out on a nice March 15 day. 15:09 Wes: Right. Gotta go out on the ides. It's my favorite time to go out. 15:13 Erin: Gotta press the flesh. 15:14 Wes: The soothsayer already told me. But he's a dreamer. Right. We get a new omen and then some competing interpretations. Yeah. Do to. You want. Want to give that. 15:25 Erin: So Calpurnia dreamt that she saw Caesar's statue, which, like a fountain with a hundred spouts, did run pure blood. And many lusty Romans came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. And these did she apply for warnings and portents and evils imminent. And on her knee hath begged that I will stay at home today. And Decius says this dream is all a misinterpreted. It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes, pipes in which so many smiling Romans bathed, signifies that from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood, and that great men shall press for tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance. This by Calpurnia's dream is signified. So, yeah, I think in. In part one or two, I talked a little bit about, or we both did, about this idea of interpretation being central to the play and to the whole story. And here we have this, like, really specific moment of deliberate misinterpretation or reading of this dream, which is designed to get Caesar to come out of the house. But it's, you know, same. Exact same image, completely different message taken from that. It just, you know, reminds me of Caesar's fainting, you know, from epilepsy that we talked about in parts one and two, and the varying impressions that people are getting from his behavior. For instance. 16:41 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Caesar conceives of himself as an unmoved mover. And here flattery is going to do the job. And that's precisely what Decius said when they were conspiring. And, in fact, you just flatter him by saying he can't be flattered. But here the flattery is more about his glory and the love of Romans and what he is to Rome. Before that, when Caesar has said that he's not going to go out, he says, I will not come today. Cannot is false. And therefore. And that I dare not false her, I will not come. And then Decius says, I'm going to be laughed at if you don't give Me a cause. And Caesar says, the cause is in my will. I will not come. That is enough to satisfy the Senate. So he's an unmoved mover in the sense that he doesn't need to give explanations through his actions. It just stops with his will. And that includes his behavior is not going to be explained by fear, but it doesn't need to be explained by any other motivation as well, as far as he's concerned. And it's certainly not answerable to the public, supposedly, or to the requirements of government and the state. So he's really not answerable, in a sense, to the Senate, but he turns out to be answerable in a sense. Right, because all you have to do is he's made answerable to the flattery of others or to the love of others. And that is what moves him. I mean, ultimately, Decius also has to say, they're going to give you the crown, or they're going to think you're afraid. So he uses other elements of manipulation as well. But there's a very stark contrast between Caesar's conception of himself as an unmoved mover, but how easily, actually, he is moved. He doesn't think he's answerable to the polity, to the public, but he is answerable. Decius proves he's answerable in a different sense to the public. He's answerable to glory. 18:53 Erin: I read that a little more generously, because I think he's demonstrating in that. That he's answerable to truth. And he just has to say, well, in the end, I just won't do it. He won't lie. And that's kind of all that's left to him in that moment. When I. I turned back the page to try and find that moment, I saw a few other instances of will being used which are kind of interesting, you know, Caesar bids his servant to go ask the priest for their opinions of his success. And the servant exits, saying, I will, my lord. There are a bunch of these instances where the servants say, I will, that I just happened to see. And then, of course, when Caesar gives that great speech that you just mentioned a moment ago, and doth say that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. You know, death's will is. Is also something to which we're all answerable. Right. He ultimately says, you know, after Decius convinces him, says, how foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia, I am ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go. So he's ashamed he yielded to his wife's fear. And now he's willing himself to go rather than willing himself to stay or something like that. 20:01 Wes: He's afraid of being seen as fearful, then ironically. 20:05 Erin: Oh, yes, yes, certainly. But I think. No, just your reading of the word will, I think, is a really interesting one. 20:11 Wes: Yeah. Right. To say the cause is my will. Right. It becomes a little bit of a reflection on the philosophy of free will. Where to say that I freely act, does that mean it can be unmotivated? Of course. That's a nonsensical conception of what it means to freely act. To freely act is to act with reasons. But when we act with reasons, it seems like we are bound to those reasons, and in a sense, we are. But being bound to good reasons is not the same thing necessarily as being bound to some emotion or another like fear. Although we might have a good reason premised in fear. But in any case. Yeah. To say the cause is my will, well, I would say it's kind of delusional. Right. And it is kind of the authoritarian way of looking at things, par excellence. That's why in Hitler's Mein Kampf, which I've mentioned a few times on this show, it's all about will, and of course, is a bit borrowed from Nietzsche and will to power. But for the authoritarian, the concept of will becomes very, very important. The grounding of authority. Authority is no longer grounded in any other cause. It's not for the public good, it's not for this, it's not for that. It's just because I will it. The strongest will is the one that wins. And the strong man, the great leader, is the one with the strongest will. 21:38 Erin: Well, I don't want to sound like I'm supporting Hitler, but I am just. I am just saying that this is about him, whether or not he wants to go to work today. And that is often a matter of will in our own personal lives. It's not as though he's saying, will I kill you just for fun. Yeah. 21:58 Wes: But we might admit, I feel tired today, or I'm afraid because there's a bunch of people who are going to stab me. We might be able to admit that to ourselves. 22:08 Erin: That's right. I suppose I've said that interpretation is really the central idea of the play, but also will is the extent to which, to my mind, Brutus sort of wills himself into the justification for the. I mean, it's more complicated than that. But there is this idea of. I think it's about free will, in a sense. Where does the motivation come from or where does the action come from or where. In a way it's about this idea of all of this having already happened, or it being a play or it being a story that everybody already knows. In a story that everyone knows the outcome and knows what has to happen, where does the will come from? I think the play is sort of about that. So that will being behind everybody's motivations, really, it's really. It's almost an illusion. In fact, all of this has been preordained. We all know what's going to happen and it has to happen the way that it does. So I take. Yeah, that's a long way of saying I take this moment rather lightly. I think it's a comedic moment and I think we have to know it's a comedic moment because we know he has to go to work that day because he has to get stabbed. And it's really not a matter of his will at all. You know, that's kind of the fascination. 23:12 Wes: You don't think this is an attempt to illustrate an authoritarian personality like I do? You don't? 23:19 Erin: Not quite. I think it's a funny moment, you know, because he's making light of the. I mean, I think it is and it isn't. Right. It illustrates something about him just saying. Well, because I say so, certainly. But there's something light hearted about it at the same time because he's sort of struggling to come up with. 23:38 Wes: It's definitely light hearted as well. Yeah. 23:40 Erin: And ultimately it's toying with us. It's about. There's a third or fourth order motivation here, which is about him going, I'm not going to go, but we all know he has to go. So how is he. How are we going to get him to his inevitable conclusion here? It's about toying with the audience a bit and realizing that, well, he actually has no free will in the circumstance because he's inside a play or he's inside history, which has its way with him. I mean, that's rather meta. But I think a lot of that is being played with throughout the play too. So it's funny to talk about will when you're an actor on the stage in a play, which we all know the ending to, even if we haven't seen the play. Right. So there is something a bit comical. So I think ultimately the effect of that for me is it's often Caesar's pomposity or prayer tricks the pomposity, because we know that he has no free will at all in this particular circumstance. You Know, and it's, it's just about the mechanism of, of the form itself in a way that I think it exaggerates Brutus's bad. Like something about the form itself and Brutus's cogitations or self justifications or rationalizations, I should say, heightens his bad qualities. 24:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I don't. Yeah, I don't think. I agree. I think it's quite a negative representation of Caesar. And historically, a lot of critics, even shortly after the play came out, reacted, how dare you portray Caesar this way. But I get your point. Yeah, I think your point is well taken about. Well, I don't see Brutus as negatively as you. I think Shakespeare is trying to point to this parallel. Right. So they're both willful and in Brutus case, Brutus. And this comes out in the letters to Cicero, by the way, as well. Brutus is like, consequences be damned. I don't care about my own safety. I don't care what happens. I'm going to do what's right. That's the whole honor, virtue thing. And as I said, fearlessness is to Caesar what honor is to Brutus. Fearlessness, including all the incredible stuff he's done, like killing a million Gauls, all these feats of war that he's engaged and power and prowess. And that element of his character is supposed to ground the rightness of what he's doing. And for Brutus, it seems to be honor. You could say it's for the republic, but is it really for the republic if you're also saying consequences be damned? So motivation becomes very important here and whether one is motivated by a conception of what's right, what we call a deontological kind of motivation or a consequentialist idea, what's going to be, on a practical level, good for the republic? Maybe it's not a great idea to launch a civil war, even if not doing so will lead to Caesar having too much power. Maybe it'll be counterproductive and actually accelerate the devolution into empire. If you initiate a civil war at this point, there are all sorts of consequentialist considerations, which are the things that Brutus should have been deliberating about. But for him, it's all about honor. 26:53 Erin: Rah, rah, rah. 26:54 Wes: The Republic, consequences be damned. I'm going to do this. So it's the same. The cause in my will is actually quite a bit closer to that, to Brutus's point of view as well. And I think, yeah, Shakespeare is deliberate, deliberately drawing those parallels. But the scene ends poignantly with. It's kind of sad because all his friends show up and they have wine together, but they're really on the way to killing him. By the way, I do want to say the other thing about something just coming from one's will. It also suggests that you're beyond the causal order, which is part of the whole idea of what's natural versus unnatural. So you transcend the natural order of if your action can't be explained in terms of natural causes or motivational causes, if it just starts from your will. And that's that unnaturalness that is expressed in the storm. And that's part of the supposed unnaturalness of authoritarianism. It doesn't answer to anything. It's not a part of any causal order. 27:59 Erin: That's a really interesting idea because then how might we square this with the. There's. There's a pretense for getting close to Caesar in order to assassinate him, which is the banishment of cimber and Caesar. Caesar makes mention of this. You know, I. He says, I'm not going to be moved by, well, flattery. Right. We know, we know he can be 28:21 Wes: another unmoved mover, you know, self conception of him, you know, conception of himself as an unmoved mover. 28:26 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And he says he can't be. Uses this metaphor about hot versus cold blood, which is kind of interesting. And then he says at the end, no, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause will he be satisfied. He doesn't act unjustly by not allowing Cimber back. He won't let Cimber back in, pardon him without cause. But that seems to be like, what cause would he need to pardon him? That is the question. Because that seems. That idea of like, think pardoning is an interesting one because it's about the will. Right. You can only pardon someone according to. I mean, I suppose they would have to maybe do some sort of retributive. I'm sorry. They would have to do some sort of restitution to get back into good favor. So there would be something assigned to their will in order to win them. Win their place back into someone's good graces. But if they're banished, how can they do that? It's purely a matter of. Of Caesar's will as to whether or not he would let cimber back into Rome. I introduced this with the idea that this is a false excuse to get close for the conspirators to get up close to him so that they could stab him. 29:36 Wes: Yeah. So they know he's not going to say yes, of course, but it gives them all an excuse to. And by the way, Caesar doth not wrong, but with just cause. It's meant to be funny. It's a bit of a joke because you can't justly do anyone wrong. This is the thing. Ben Jonson excoriated Shakespeare for this line. And that's what I'm looking for here. I thought I had the quotation. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said, in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, Caesar, thou dost me wrong. He replied, caesar never did wrong, but with just cause and such like which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned. Now, that is a very big misjudgment on Jonson's part. That's a great line. It's part of Shakespeare's genius to put in someone contradicting themselves like that. Right? 30:31 Erin: Yes. 30:32 Wes: What Caesar is trying to say, there's a double entendre on wrong. He's not going to do violence to anyone unless there's a just reason for it. Although, of course, this is kind of the paradox at the center of the justice system in general. Right. We have a right to life and liberty, but we might execute someone or put someone behind bars. And so in the context of punishment, the right goes away. Well, then how is it a right? Right. So those sorts of paradoxes arise. But in this case, yeah, this is the. I think it's a great line, and it's one that Jonson doesn't like. But he sees his lack of mercy as a virtue because he sees it as part and parcel of his incorruptibility, and even says he's not going to turn preordinance and first decree into the law of children. So he conceives of it as being in accord with the law. He's a defender of the law. The law of children is whim, and that's the law of the tyrant. The law of the child and the law of the tyrant are the same thing, which is to do things according to whim instead of actual law. But Caesar identifies, in a way his will with the law. The imperturbability of his will is the constancy that's supposed to be there in the law. But of course, that's not the way it's supposed to go. The law has to be the imperturbable thing, and the particular actor, the leader, their will doesn't matter. They're just as beholden to the laws as anyone else. So will and law form a pair here. And the locus of authority should be in the law and not in a particular person's will. And not just in the law, but in custom, in social constructs, more generally, in ceremony. In that sense, we must stand on ceremony, even if it seems spooky. 32:23 Erin: Yeah. And the will here is also to remove Cimber from the law, remove him from the order, banish him him, in other words, so that he's no longer enfranchised. So that's an interesting idea. And he says, if I could pray to move, prayers would move me. I love this, but I'm constant as a Northern Star. 32:42 Wes: It's also a great Joni Mitchell song. 32:45 Erin: Yes. 32:47 Wes: Was it a case of you? 32:48 Erin: Yes. Do not goad me. 32:51 Wes: I just cannot read that line. I don't think of Shakespeare. I think of the Joni Mitchell song. 32:56 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. I was immediately going to start doing it. Yes, I can. 33:00 Wes: I was gonna. You gotta start doing it. 33:02 Erin: Nope, nope, nope. No. 33:04 Wes: I had to stop myself just because it would be so terrible. Would I think. 33:07 Erin: There's nothing I hate listening to more than my own impressions on this stupid podcast, so I am not going to do. 33:13 Wes: You're really depriving the audience because they are. She's really good at impressions, guys, by the way, 33:23 Erin: so I can't be flattered. 33:26 Wes: That's right. You are as constant as the Northern Star, Constantly not doing impressions. 33:33 Erin: The other. Yeah. I never, ever give in. We all know it. This time I won't. All right, so everyone does shine. Everyone. Yes. Okay. So only one holds its place, and that's me. I am the still point of the turning world. 33:48 Wes: And in particular, others are movable because of fear. I think he says, again, they're apprehensive. 33:54 Erin: Men are flesh and blood and apprehensive. But I am not man. I am Caesar. 34:02 Wes: Anyway, yeah, so I feel a bit vindicated here that he's trying to portray an authoritarian person. Oh. 34:09 Erin: Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. I just met in that particular moment. I thought it was. I thought he was being kind of funny. 34:15 Wes: Yeah. 34:15 Erin: And I think that's even maybe self lampooning a little bit. I don't know. Maybe that's a bit too far. Okay. And then he gets stabbed. Didn't see that coming. What do we have to say about that? Nothing. 34:25 Wes: They all stab him. 32. 33. It's 33, right? Jesus's age. Shakespeare changes this to be the same number of stabs as Years in Jesus's life. 34:39 Erin: See, we know what side you're on. 34:41 Wes: And I think in Plutarch, he says, you, too, child. He refers to Caesar. Well, the story is that he calls Brutus child. And it's not et tu. It's not N U. It's just. I forget what it is. But anyway, et tu, Brute? Great. 34:57 Erin: So great. Then fall, Caesar, also great. Gives his own stage direction, 35:05 Wes: right? 35:06 Erin: He becomes the playwright. 35:07 Wes: I fall because I will. Exactly. Not because I've been stabbed. I will it. 35:13 Erin: Well, it's badass. It really is. Gotta give him credit. And Brutus is telling everybody else who's witnessing this, like, don't run away. This is going exactly according to plan. Ambition's debt is paid. We're not going to kill anybody else here. Because for some reason, I don't know, they look like absolute psychos. 35:29 Wes: What comes across in these scenes following the assassination is the naivete where, okay, everyone, calm down. Nothing bad's gonna happen. Of course, they've unleashed the dogs of war, as Antony will say. I always forgot that that line is in this play as opposed to, like, one of the British history plays. But anyway, yeah, they've unleashed hell on Rome, or, you know, but they naively think that by saying liberty and freedom and. And all that stuff that they're going to get a good reception. And they underestimate Mark Antony. 36:06 Erin: Of course, Brutus does, especially after the augmented line. My second favorite love to hate Brutus moment is, stoop, Roman, stoop. And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood up to the elbows and besmear our swords. Then walk we forth, even to the marketplace, and waving our red weapons o' er our heads, let's all cry peace, freedom and liberty. Absolutely insane. Like, Brutus is insane. 36:36 Wes: They sound like hippies thinking that their protest is going to go over well with people. 36:41 Erin: Yeah, and they're covered in blood in 36:44 Wes: the middle of the road or something. And, yeah, now everyone's going to be 36:47 Erin: on our side, right? 36:48 Wes: And then the great, you know, line by Cassius, how many ages hence shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown? Brutus, how many times shall Caesar bleed in sport? And then Cassius will be called the men that gave their country liberty. So they're right that it's going to be remembered and used as material for 37:15 Erin: plays and podcasts yet unknown. 37:19 Wes: Podcasts yet unknown. But they're wrong about how it's going to be remembered and certainly about the liberty part. And then the next thing is really the introduction of Marc Antony, which is really. He's now introduced into the play by a servant. In a way, this is a more consequential moment than the stabbing itself. In a sense, dramatically. Maybe I'm overstating that, but Mark Antony, who's been largely absent, is now going to take on this huge. Is he the shoe that drops? 37:51 Erin: Yes, I think in a way you're right. In another way, I think if we're reading this play rather than seeing it, then of course Antony's entrance is going to be very. It's going to overshadow the one stage direction we get, which is he dies. But of course, we have to imagine this is very dramatically done. 38:08 Wes: Conceivably, everything could have ended here. He's dead and that's it. Nothing else happens after that. But Mark Antony sets us up for he is now the main actor. He's gonna produce all the action that follows. 38:24 Erin: Yeah, there's something more to come here. 38:27 Wes: Yeah. So he's the catalyst or the igniting fuel for the rest of the play. 38:33 Erin: Yeah. And we get this really interesting proxy for Antony and his servant because Antony's smart enough to send somebody just in case they have it in for him too. And in fact, they should have. We get the list of the four adjectives which are really interesting. Brutus is noble, wise, valiant and honest. Caesar was mighty, bold, royal and loving. I really like those. The contrast between those two things, those two sets. 38:59 Wes: I should say those two sets of adjectives are right. They point to the different aspects of character that Caesar. They're self concepts. It's Caesar's might and fearlessness and courageousness. Right. Bold, fearless. That's the thing he prides himself on. And that's the thing which his authority is supposedly derived from. And for Brutus, it's honor, virtue. 39:21 Erin: And then we get. Say I love Brutus and I honor him. Say I feared Caesar, honored him and loved him. So there's an interesting. 39:31 Wes: Yeah, so why does he need to introduce the fear with Caesar? And then honor and love are reversed. Right. Loves Brutus, honors him, but honors Caesar, loves him. And then also we add fear, the 39:47 Erin: chiasmus, sort of chiasmus. Because there's, as you say, this extra thing added in, creates the sort of love sandwich here. So we begin and end with love. But it's first and therefore for secondary in the Brutus list and primary in the Caesar list, taking the last place. 40:07 Wes: Yeah. The fear seems to suggest that he didn't necessarily. Wasn't on board with everything. Caesar was doing, but was going along with it out of fear. And by implication, by leaving out the fear of them, he's suggesting he doesn't actually fear them when he. Of course he does. And he should. And he does because he sent the servant and he should. 40:29 Erin: And of course they don't want. I mean, Brutus. This is designed to appeal to Brutus. He's also emphasizing the power vacuum that's now been created, which of course Brutus cannot fill. So he's not going to fear Brutus as an emperor in the absence of Caesar. Yeah, it's designed to appeal to Brutus in a couple of different ways. Acknowledging that there's no longer anyone left to fear because Brutus is. Has restored the leaderlessness or something of Rome. Yeah. And then basically Antony wants to make sure that it's safe for him to come out and play. And Brutus assures him that it is by saying to the servant, thy master is a wise and valiant Roman. Which I love because it repeats two words that Antony used for Brutus rather than the two words two of the four he used for Caesar. Tell him so please him, come unto this place, he shall be satisfied and by my honor depart untouched. And that's when Antony really knows that he's going to be okay because Brutus has attached this to his honor and therefore we'll leave him untouched. 41:34 Wes: Cassius is still skeptical. He still fears him. And he thinks his fear is probably going to be borne out in the consequences. My misgiving still falls truly to the purpose. And yeah, this is another, what turns out to be another one of Brutus mistakes. Well, he's already rejected Cassius's suggestion that they kill him during the. During their conspirators meeting. He's not going to do it now. Cassius is worried about it. Rightly so. 42:02 Erin: What I love is that Cassius repeats of Antony a sort of scrambled version of what Caesar says of Cassius. Cassius says, I wish we may, but yet I have a mind that fears him much. And my misgiving still falls shrewdly to the purpose of Cassius. Caesar says, but I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid so soon as that spare Cassius, the use of yet there and much and fear. 42:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Caesar fears Cassius, Cassius fears Antony. Antony fears Caesar. It's a fool feared. All right, then I am afraid we have to end there. That is part four of our 30 part series on Julius Caesar. No, hopefully we'll just do two more 42:54 Erin: parts yes, we are gonna have to. 42:58 Wes: We can do what we want. The audience is gonna have to. 43:00 Erin: If we will it, then, right. Anything's possible. 43:04 Wes: Now, we can't force people to listen. 43:06 Erin: That's right. 43:07 Wes: If we were Caesar, we could, but. All right. So thank you, thank you, 43:17 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. 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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part three of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the end of part two, which admittedly is. How long ago, Erin, was that three weeks ago that we recorded? 0:45 Erin: Oh, no, was it three? I thought it was only two weeks ago. 0:47 Wes: Oh, well, maybe. 0:48 Erin: Seems longer. 0:49 Wes: I thought we might have postponed it because of the holiday, but. Oh, maybe we're jumping back in after a bit of a gap. So I think we were done or almost done talking about the end of act one with the storm. And I think the main idea there was that there's something about the storm which represented unnaturalness, the corruption of nature. Right. Things. People walking around with their hands on fire but not being bothered by it. Nature being corrupted in the sense of things not behaving as they would normally do according to their natures. According to their natural properties, hands should. Should burn and people should be a little bit bothered by it, at the very least. And that that unnaturalness represents something about what happens to a person who's corrupted by power or to a state that's corrupted by power. And so it's interpreted in that sense by Cassius, after Cicero just kind of dismisses Casca's concerns as just superstition. And Cassius interprets it at first as representative of that kind of corruption. And so it is a warning in that sense. And then he ends with a bit of a shift to saying, well, the storm also represents the things that we're going to have to do to oppose Caesar. The storm represents the rebellion. And there you get a little bit of the reminder that the rebellion and that Caesar's authoritarianism and whatever is going on with the rebels might be mirror images of each other. And that, I think, is what Shakespeare is actually partly reflecting on. We talked quite a bit in the first two parts about Caesar and Brutus as mirrors or mirror images of each other, where in a way, their authority. Right. In Caesar's case, his authority is supposed to be a role within a republic, but it's come to be identified with him as a person is a person who has all these great feats as a person because of his personal prowess, which is a certain kind of virtue. It's a certain aspect of his character. And likewise, Brutus seems to implicitly want to make the claim and does in his own funeral. Well, it's not a funeral oration, but speech. Following Caesar's death, he will want to say, my authority in some sense is a function of my virtue and my honor. Brutus is an honorable man. And then that kind of appeal to character as a foundation for authority, we have the same sort of problem. And that, I think, is really what Shakespeare is onto. Over the vacation, I went and reread some of Plutarch's lives with Brutus and Caesar. And Mark Antony didn't get to Cassius. But it's really interesting because you can kind of see, first of all, he really heavily relies on Plutarch. In some cases, some of his lines are just slightly modified variations on something that Plutarch has said. But you get to see what he's thinking about, what Shakespeare is really doing with it. And what he's doing is a very interesting thing, which he's drawing this parallel between Brutus and Caesar and wondering if, in light of the aftermath of what Brutus and the rebels did, which kind of led to The Empire, ironically, although the Republic was kind of shit show for 90 years before all this happened. They were fighting. They were friends. It's kind of amazing to see what was going on. Brutus was writing treatises on virtue. He was a philosopher by day and by night, they were just going out and conquering half the world and fighting each other and doing all this crazy stuff. It's really quite amazing what was. Was going on in that context. And it reminded me that Brutus and Caesar were friends. 4:40 Erin: Oh, yeah. Caesar loved Brutus. 4:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, they had been enemies at various points in the past, too. But these are people who had traveled together extensively, gone to war together. You know, it's in the background of the play that you don't. If you're not familiar with the history, it helps in a way to become familiar with it, because Brutus is. And really the rest of the conspirators are. They're involved. They're not just killing. Oh, he's. You know, it's not like some stranger is killing a. Doing an assassination of a tyrant. It's these. These people are killing their friend because he's gotten too big for his britches. So wanted to say also, there are some extant letters by Brutus between Brutus and Cicero, and they sound very much like Brutus in the play. He is a person who is entitled, in a way, by his sense of honor. You get the sense that he may have been from Plutarch as well. He might have been kind of induced into doing this by people appealing to his relationship to his ancestor. Like all that stuff happened with Cassius putting the letters. It's there in Plutarch and sounds like he might have been manipulated by concern for his reputation into acting. So we get this kind of question of is he acting for the republic and for the public good, or is he doing something out of his own honor? That, in a way, looks a bit like Cassius. It's a bit closer to Cassius motives which are envious, or to Caesar's motives, which seem to be about power at this point. And that's the question. But I just wanted to say Shakespeare took Plutarch and had an interesting idea, which is he wanted to reflect on the nature of power and how it's grounded and in particular, whether it's a good idea to ground power in the character of a particular actor as opposed to certain institutions. Right. The character of whether it's Caesar or Brutus, and then the confusion between that, because Brutus thinks he's all about the Republic and he Says this in his letters to Cicero, too. And he really chews out Cicero, because at this point, Cicero is thinking on Octavius's side. And Octavius and Antony are fighting at this point. And Cicero has taken a liking to the boy, as Brutus calls Octavius as a foil to Antony. Octavius, of course, will turn out to be Augustus Caesar, the first emperor. And he chews him out for wanting to be. What are you? You just a slave? You think he's going to be a better master than Caesar was or than Antony would be. Brutus is always on and on about freedom and slavery and honor and the republic and this and that. But is he thinking about the republic or is he thinking about his own honor and character? And it's never quite clear how you disentangle those things. And this is a very common political problem. Where am I really talking about the general good or am I talking about myself? That's kind of my recap of where we were with this. 7:35 Erin: I think, in a way, you're talking about kind of the same principles over and over again. I'm seeing, in a way to tie this all together. I'm seeing that the idea that Cassius is reverse engineering the sign of the storm to suddenly reflect him. There's this causation kind of problem, I think, that the play is dealing with up until the moment of the assassination, where cause and effect somehow seem to be reversed or confused, or maybe what the cause is kind of can't be located. So in the same way that you're describing, there's this idea of the natural and the reverse engineering of the sign that the storm represents. There's this idea in Brutus that his republican aristocratic lineage gives him the right to do away with someone who would be king or would be emperor, and to therefore violently restore republicanism. And also this idea of being honorable, that any action one performs will be honorable if one is honorable, rather than the. The honor adhering in the action itself. So I think there's this confusion or maybe something like the stickiness of the adjective. And what I think Brutus is doing in his slippery logic, especially as we get into Act 2, Scene 1, is moving the adjective from what might be its most logical place to elsewhere. Right. In this instance of honor, I'm using this sort of incorrectly because it can't really be applied grammatically in the passages that we're going to look at. But he's taking a quality and I think applying it where it doesn't belong, essentially. But a lot of what he does is play with grammar, I think, you know, famously in this, in line 10, it must be by his death. There's a reversal of order that keeps happening, I think, in terms of just temporally, where he puts the cart before the horse. So the. It in that line, it's very, very much like. Like Macbeth. There's so many, I think, parallels to Macbeth throughout this, the whole play, really, but especially in Act 2, as they're planning the murder. It reminds me of in Macbeth, if it were done when tis done, then twere well, it were done quickly, the it being the murder. Right. So it must be by his death, it meaning his overthrow, I suppose. But it's a very imprecise. Obviously very imprecise pronoun. So one wonders what exactly he means by it in that line. 10:00 Wes: So it must be by his death. And for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn him, but for the general, he would be crowned, how that might change his nature. 10:08 Erin: There's the question what might happen. Let's take a proactive approach here. 10:14 Wes: But again, this, you know, this question of nature and character. Right. Something I want to keep hammering away at, where our characters are second nature. It's not nature. The property of. The natural tendency of an acorn to grow into a tree is its nature, or the property of an electron. It has a certain nature. It behaves certain ways under certain circumstances. But human character is like a second nature. It involves a set of dispositions to think and act and feel in certain ways, and it's hard to change. It's also the locus of virtue, which is pretty much what Brutus is about, but something that's hard to change, but something that can be perverted and corrupted. And when it is corrupted, it looks like all these unnatural things that happen, like with people's burning hands. Burning. It's the burning hands and people not reacting to it are in a way, representation of something that's gone wrong with someone's character. So Caesar might have his nature change. And this is, you know, as you pointed out. Yeah. This is an interesting aspect of this because we get. We'll get several speeches in this play that kind of say, well, Caesar, he didn't really do anything yet. 11:27 Erin: Yes, right. 11:28 Wes: But he might be corrupted by this. Yeah. 11:31 Erin: Right. Well, a really great example of this is this, the Adder. And then the ladder imagery here. So we have. It is the bright, bright day that brings forth the Adder, and that craves wary walking crown him that. And then, I grant, we put a sting in him that at his will he may do danger with so, so much going on here. But first of all, it is the bright day that brings forth the adder is so fascinating because we're talking immediately about a quality that inheres in the adder itself. But first we have like these conditions that sort of create the adder in a weird way. And the conditions, the bright day, you know, in Brutus's mind, Caesar here is the snake. He's the snake in this nice scene. But the bright day might have been created by Caesar himself. Right. A favorable day, like a nice day. Oh, it's the, you know, it's the easy times. 12:23 Wes: Yeah. I think it means the glory and the adulation of the people. 12:27 Erin: Okay. 12:27 Wes: Because there are several lines, there are several comparisons like this in the the place. It's part of the same line of thought where Caesar is not, he's a colossus, but only relative to the people who cower underneath him. He's not really a colossus in and of himself. That's not his nature. And there's meant to be an explicit parallel here to you have no mirrors. You know what Cassius says to Brutus about not having a mirror, Caesar has a mirror. That's the bright day. It's the adulation of the people, it's the glory associated with his magnificent accomplishments. And that's what brings out the adder. Power corrupts, in other words, it's another way of saying power corrupts. 13:06 Erin: I see again, I think of something that I think we touched on in either part one or two, which is that I think in a way that honor isn't. Populism truly is its own defense or its own, I don't know, Popularity, I should say, is its own self evident kind of not virtue, but it's its own reward or whatever. Right. So Caesar is continually faulted for being popular or for having the love of the people. And you know, the bright day in itself has nothing wrong with it. 13:40 Wes: I think this is another part of what Shakespeare is reflecting on because Brutus is rah, rah, rah, the republic and freedom and part of that are some democratic institutions. Even though it's not not a democracy per se. It's a really complicated situation. But you have the tribunes, that's the way the play begins, chastising the people for being fickle. So if you think democracy is your way out, well, the plebeians may just have the tendency to hand over absolute power to a charismatic figure, to a strong man, to the man who has all the Glory from all his great war deeds, because they want a mirror too. They want to be able to see themselves and the magnificence of the leader. Everyone's out for their mirrors for their own bright day, so to speak. The problem is very complicated because an appeal to the republic, Shakespeare is pointing out an appeal to democratic institutions doesn't by itself. And that's the kind of thing that Brutus does in his letters. And it doesn't get you out of the problem. Again, the plebeians can just. They might be in love with authoritarianism. 14:52 Erin: Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, continuing with that thought, Brutus goes on to say, crown him that. And then, I grant, we put a sting in him. So again, I really love this imprecise that obviously it means crown him king, crown him emperor, crown him something. But the imprecision or the lack of some kind of precise noun there, I think speaks a lot to the conjecture with which Brutus is sort of thinking about this is operating, or that there's an emptiness, there's just a possibility that he's toying with at the center of his argument. So if we crown him, then I grant we put a sting in him. So Caesar's already an adder, but if we crown him, then we're giving the adder fangs like he didn't have them already. This is a fundamental perversion, as you're saying, of his nature somehow to do this. So again, there's some like, it's the bright day that's bringing forth the snake. But then only if we give him a crown, is he going to be a snake that we have to actually be wary of. Like there's something a little bit lumbering about this logic or a little bit broken. 16:02 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. So I think, again, yeah, the crown him, as you point out, the crown him him. That. That's a great little touch by Shakespeare, because in a way, he doesn't want to say the name that's so taboo. But Caesar's name is already becoming synonymous with king. Right. Even to say Caesar's name is to say that. So as it goes on, the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power, which I take to be, again, another form of power corrupting by a. By taking away conscience and taking away inhibitions from doing things which are unjust or terrible. And to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affection swayed more than his reason. Right. So he's not. I haven't known him to be driven by his emotions. He's been pretty reasonable. But tis common proof that lowliness is young. Ambition's ladder, where to the climber upward turns his face. But when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. The base degrees being the lower rungs of the ladder, which include his. You know, the friends who helped him rise. Supposedly, it says so Caesar may. 17:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. This is such a fuzzy image, because ambition itself is the climber, not a person climbing a ladder. Right. This is 2 degrees removed from an actual human being. So we have ambition itself climbing the ladder, which is lowliness. And ambition, of course, we know, is Caesar, that's the adder. And lowliness is then added to it, like the L to the adder, to create a ladder. They're so far away from each other that they're both at the end of the line, ladder and adder. But they don't rise really with each other. Or they do, but only in this really delayed way. And it's almost as though he's given himself a thought. And then he augments it, if you like to use a word that he'll use in a second with a different kind of thought, a different kind of image, but it's just piggybacking off of. Off of smoke, off of something he's admitted isn't really a problem or hasn't been seen to be a problem yet. 18:13 Wes: Yeah, and I mean, this is a great point. It's a great example of what I think Shakespeare is thinking about across multiple plays, which is the role of metaphor in reasoning. Shakespeare is a great deployer of metaphor, but he's also thinking about metaphor. We saw some of that in Much Ado, where Hero was so stained by her slutty behavior, supposed slutty behavior, that not even all the water of the ocean could wash her off. This kind of. And this becomes a sort of legal indictment about her character and who she is. And in this case, the use of metaphor here is with ambition. It's ambition that's climbing the ladder. And Caesar. In a way, the argument is meant to be an indictment of Caesar, but it really is an indictment of ambition in general. It's ambition that does all this. It's ambition that turns his face and then turns his back on the lower rungs and all. All that stuff. So if Caesar is ambitious, then he might. He may do all of these things. So he's recognizing a general dynamic in ambition. And it's not to say that the argument Might not hold if Caesar is ambitious. But the reasoning is primarily about ambition. 19:27 Erin: There's something geometric happening here, too. Did you notice this? The base degrees. And we have the idea of turning one's face. So this ambition supposedly has a face, which is another thing that Brutus does. He's assigning a body to characteristics. Right. Rather than looking at a body and seeing what characteristics that body has. So ambition turns its face toward the ladder, and then climbs up the ladder, and then unto the ladder, turns his back. Well, if one climbs up a ladder, your back is already turned to the ladder. Right. Like there's something bizarre that's happening. So you climb up a ladder and you get to the top and your back is already to it. If you face the ladder to ascend. 20:12 Wes: Just to get specific about the metaphor. Right. So lowliness is like humility. Humility is young. Ambition's ladder. So ambition pretends to be humble and uses that to climb. So where to? The climber upward, turns his face. Double meaning, I think, but turns his face, as in puts on a humble face. 20:32 Erin: Right. 20:32 Wes: But also. Right. You get this idea, as you're pointing out, of facing upward as you go up the ladder. Right? 20:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And then turning, turning one's back to the ladder, which you can't do while you're on the ladder. You have to, you know, but once you walk away from the ladder. So once you've ascended, you have to kind of. You're already oriented past the ladder when you get off it with your back to it. 20:55 Wes: Yeah. 20:55 Erin: So it's natural, in other words, to not turn around and then look at the ladder. From once you came, as soon as you get to the utmost rung or whatever it is. Right. You're already going to be turning your back to the ladder just when you step off of it. 21:08 Wes: Yeah. These places where the metaphors kind of break down are also really interesting. And metaphors inevitably do as you extend them. I mean, part of the satisfaction of great metaphors is you can extend them to a great degree, to a larger degree than on average. Even though the two things in juxtaposition are often quite different, it makes them almost like a scientific model with predictive power, where you're saying one thing is structured like another, or this particular structure explains certain phenomena. And then I can empirically test it and see if the phenomena line up. And then in the cases, metaphors, they eventually don't. Right. So if Juliet is the sun, it may be because she's the light for Romeo and she provides what's needed for him. To grow and various other things. But she's not as hot as the sun. The sun is a ten and she's a nine. Everyone knows that. So the metaphor fails at some point. And here. Yeah, and it tells us something. Here you're pointing to the point of failure. But the ladder itself is humility. Right. So when we turn our back on. On the ladder, we turn our back on the. We turn our face towards it, which I think in part means to put on a humble aspect. To put on a humble face. And then we have this idea of turning our back on it, which means we show our true colors and become arrogant. Right. Scorn the base degrees and scorn our own humility, but also scorn the humble, the people to whom we showed humility and grace and other good qualities in order to get where we ascended to. 22:47 Erin: Yeah, I like the idea, too, that very shortly, you know, the conspirators will show up with their faces actually covered. Right. So their faces are, in fact, more turned. And Brutus will also give them instructions to sort of hide their conspiracy behind a false face. 23:03 Wes: Yeah. And to be good actors. 23:05 Erin: Exactly. 23:06 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus ends this little. This bit with something quite cynical, which is he's thinking about what he's going to tell people after they assassinate him is essentially the gist of the end of this speech. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may prevent. Right. So just. We're going to stop him before it happens. And since the quarrel will bear no color for the thing he is. Right. So the thing he is right now is not. He's not a terrible tyrant right now. And so it's not going to look that way to people fashion it thus. Which means this is the way we're going to represent it to others. That which he is augmented would run to these and these extremities and therefore think him as a serpent's egg which hatched, would, as its kind, grow mischievous and kill him in the shell. So we nipped it in the bud, people, why did we kill Caesar? You may not have thought he was a tyrant, but he was about to grow into one. And we saw the signs of that. That. And so we nipped this in the bud. 24:06 Erin: This is the number one place I could point to in my dislike of Caesar. I'm sorry, in my dislike of Brutus. Yeah. We'll bear no color for the thing he is. Fashion it thus that what he is augmented would run to these. This is truly crazy. Right? This is so annoying. Okay, I can't really make this argument right now, but what I can say is that if he were different than what he is, then we should kill him. And that's going to be my. Like this is pure fumes. What he is augmented. I know I'm representing it a little bit more extreme than what it is, but it's nearly there. It's right. Then what he is augmented. So what he is changed would run to these and these extremities. 24:54 Wes: Yeah, Augmented by being given the crown, for instance. 24:58 Erin: Yeah, but it's. But there's a beauty to it all being on the same line. Right. Like there's what he is augmented also has that other. That sort of shadow, meaning what he isn't really. Or if he were different, then this would be a problem. And so we are going to kill him under the assumption that he might become that different person. 25:20 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because there's a. This kind of reflects an interesting problem within the philosophy of science which has to do with idealization of laws, of scientific laws. So there are laws that certain, you know, that things behave in a certain way, but they never really behave in that way because there are all these confounding factors. So the law is always idealized. And then you have to say, well, the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn't exactly what we would expect because there are these other factors involved. Right. Instance. So the law that tells us how the Earth should orbit around the sun is idealized. And then we get other interfering factors, for instance, might not be the greatest example, but in this case, Caesar has a certain nature. Again, the thing I wanted to kind of hammer on here. And so he is disposed to behave in such and such a way, even if we don't see it, because there are confounding factors. And the confounding factors is that he just hasn't been given the crown yet, or he's not in the right circumstance, but given the right circumstances, we're going to see it happen. 26:26 Erin: Or we should see it happen, provided that. Right. In that scientific way you're describing. It should be this way, provided that XYZ and all the other letters are in the right spot. 26:39 Wes: Yeah. He thinks he knows Caesar's nature, which is odd. Historically, I think he's probably right. But Shakespeare is asking us to be a bit skeptical. That's why he's introducing all these interesting slips, saying, well, actually he is reasonable and I haven't seen him be terrible and emotional about things, but this is his nature. And so on. Part of the question here is, well, how do you know? How do you know what his nature is. Yes, this may be the general tendency for ambition and power corrupts. But how do you know this is Caesar's? 27:16 Erin: Because, particular Evans, don't you trust Brutus, the number one people person? Obviously, 27:26 Wes: he's an honorable. He's an honorable man. 27:28 Erin: The guy who just really gets what people are like, it seems. That's really what you know. 27:33 Wes: So, yeah, so this scene, I mean, it's a great unfolding of Brutus's character as a person. And we see him in a, you know, not quite as tortured as Hamlet, obviously, but he's, you know, we get a window into his ruminations and the overcoming of his reluctance to do something about Caesar. So Cassius manipulations have worked at this point, and he's talking himself into it. 27:57 Erin: Yeah, we see Cassius, or we see the one form of manipulation that Cassius has promised. So we see these letters that have been thrown into Brutus's window, which I love because they're just vague enough, like, Cassius does know human nature and knows that Brutus will fill in the blanks with what he wants to fill it in. So better. Better to let Brutus work himself up into a lather than try to write anything that might appeal to Brutus, because really only. Only Brutus can. Can reason with Brutus. So, Brutus, thou sleeps awake and see thyself shall Rome, etc. Speak, strike, redress, shall Rome, et cetera. And then we hear Brutus, like, working out, like, oh, what does this mean? Mean, thus must I piece it out. Shall Rome stand under one man's awe. What Rome, my ancestors did from the streets of Rome, the Tarquin drive, when he was called a king. Speak, strike, redress. Am I entreated to speak and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise. If the redress will follow, thou receivest thy full petition at the hand of Brutus. So I just. I love that. I love the idea that they're like, shall Rome, etc. He's like, just like, let me fill in the blank here with what I want to hear, and then I will be convinced. I will have convinced myself. 29:12 Wes: Yeah, it's funny, I think in Plutarch there are letters, but it's also graffiti. So his ancestor Brutus, who may, or not by the way, may or may not have been his ancestor, but everyone thought he was his ancestor, driven the. How do you pronounce it? Tarquinians. Tarquin. Anyway, it prevented the monarchy hundreds of years before and so was critical to the preservation of the Republic. There were statues of this Guy. And the graffiti was put on the statues. Oh, if only Brutus were around. And it was meant to be pointed at, of course, the living Brutus, to kind of stand up and be like his ancestor, be the kind of great man his ancestor was. And so that's one of the ways in which supposedly Brutus was manipulated into getting involved in the conspiracy. And the conspirators wanted him involved because he had such a great reputation in Rome. He had a much better reputation than any of the rest of them. Reputation for being incorruptible. One of the few people who was thought of as absolutely politically incorruptible. And so to get him on board was quite an accomplishment. And then the question is, well, was he corrupted at that point? Was he actually corrupted by the conspirators into getting involved? And corrupted by making appeals to the idea of his incorruptibility, which is precisely the thing that Decius is going to accuse Caesar of. Right. Caesar is flattered by the. If you tell him he's incapable of being flattered, he's flattered by that. And you get him to do anything he wants. 30:50 Erin: Yeah. That's another point toward the mirror idea between Brutus and Caesar. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. 30:56 Wes: Yep, exactly. 30:57 Erin: Yeah. So let's jump down a little. Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar, I thought this was an interesting idea, because in a moment, Brutus is going to talk about them being swords, the conspirators being swords, in a bit of language that I particularly like. So this idea that he's being sharpened against Caesar. But he says between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. And this is just what I was referencing a minute ago, that the acting here is second. The first motion is first. So that the. The motion is the. The proposal of the action. The idea of the action and the acting of it would be second. But here he's reversed them. He's put acting first and. And motion second in the order in which he's recounting. 31:46 Wes: Yeah. So the first motion would be the initiation of the plan, or the actual. The willing of it. Like he's made the decision to do it. So in between making the decision to do this dreadful thing and then actually doing it, it's all a hideous dream because he hasn't been able to sleep. Basically, he's tortured now, but he has made his decision. And his bed. She'll end up lying. And then we get. So the conspirators come in and he gives this really interesting speech about not having to take an oath, which I thought was quite. And I thought that was actually rhetorically powerful. And I think we've already mentioned it in our parts one or two. But the idea in his speech is that we don't need an oath. We can just appeal to the identity of being Roman. Romans don't need oaths. Real men don't need oaths. Honorable people don't need oaths will just rest on our identity rather than our communication. And this is, again, reflective of a certain type of conception of power that's rooted in character and identity instead of being rooted in institutions. Because the saying of an oath or the making of a promise, that's a form of institution. And it becomes more complex in the state. But the apparatus of the state, in a way, is built off of that type of thing. Contracts, for instance. He's saying, we don't need no stinking contracts. You don't need no badges. We don't need contracts, and we don't need the state. The implicit message of this is we don't need the apparatus of a state or anything like that. We just need to know that we're honorable men, that we have a Roman identity. 33:30 Erin: This oath would be a blood oath, would it not? They would wound themselves. I mean, this is pure speculation on my part. I probably should have looked this up. Now that I think of it, I don't know. I was reading it as though it were a blood oath, and he's basically saying. Because later he says, you know, to think that our cause or our performance did need an oath, when every drop of blood that every Roman bears and nobly bears is guilty of a several bastardy if you do break the smallest particle of any promise that hath passed from him. So he's saying, like, you know, all your blood is supposed to be, you know, great Roman blood and therefore incapable of betraying, so why spill a few drops of it in this circumstance? So I was reading this as a blood oath. 34:11 Wes: Okay, Makes sense. Yeah. Guilty of a several bastardy, meaning each would be guilty of not actually being a son of Rome. That's the bastard part, right? So you're not even Roman if you would betray this conspiracy. You don't have Roman blood, so why mingle blood in a blood oath? 34:31 Erin: This is where I. I think in either part one or two, I accused Brutus of being like a gnostic, or maybe like a Manichaean, or whichever one I thought was. Was probate at the moment. But you know, he seems to have this such high mindedness that he's not taking the bodily into consideration. He's not taking things like Caesar's popularity with the common people, or he's idealizing the body, or he's doing that thing where he splits everything into component parts. So I think this is how his logic is working. One of the things I just wanted to say, sort of generally speaking is that to me the right thing seems pretty obvious, which is don't do anything, wait and see. But instead he convinces himself, you know, he's sort of the halfway point between Macbeth and Hamlet. He's not like Macbeth where he just says, okay, I'm not going to think about it, I'm just going to rush in and do it. And then be racked by guilt and have the sleeplessness be the result of guilt. But he's also not incapable of acting. But he has to convince himself that this is a good thing. And so he's going to weave this argument, in my opinion, out of very little. And in order to do that, he can't see the forest for the trees. He can't see the obvious, obvious thing. He has to atomize everything and then build a new kind of psychological motivation or justification out of that atomization. And so I think this is what we're seeing constantly in these, in, in, you know, his, his descriptions of Caesar being like the head of a body. So we don't need to hack off Mark Antony the arm of the body. And it's like, what body? You know, he, he's not playing with a whole body, he's playing with like bits and pieces of things. And so here he has this idea that, you know, our motives are good and we don't need to spill blood in order to make this oath, because we are pure and good and whole. And let high sighted tyranny range on till each man drop by lottery. This is a connection, I thought, to what he accuses Caesar of. Just before in the latter speech that we were just talking about, where once he attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. Right? So that's high sighted tyranny. So looking into the clouds, but in this very moment he's saying that we shouldn't be spilling our own blood or dealing with something lowly like that. You know, we should be thinking of our own motives, our own high minded ideals in order to justify this. Like we don't need an oath, we just need Our own high minded in order to go through with this. And so he's sort of aping the very orientation which he's at the same time deriding in Caesar. He's seeing the stars rather than dealing with the people right in front of him. 37:18 Wes: Yeah, well, you gave a good example of the perils of metaphorical reasoning with you fast forward to the point where he's rejecting, as he does a number of times, he rejects sensible suggestions by Cassius in this case to kill Mark Antony, because Mark Antony is just a limb. So if that sort of political alliance were like a human body, a truly organic whole where different parts can't change their functions, then he would be right. But that's not how the political body works, it turns out. So Antony is a huge power player and long has been in Rome and is perfectly capable of trying to, to become king himself, which is what he does historically. But it doesn't end well for him either. But anyway, or his girlfriend. Right, that's a play we should do soon, you know, again, let's be sacrificers, not butchers, Caius. Oh, he's using his first name there. Interesting. Will stand up against the spirit of Caesar and in the spirit of men there is no blood, so. So we're killing his spirit, not him. He's just a collateral damage, right? The real Caesar, the physical Caesar is collateral damage. We're killing the spirit, which is the ambition, the tyranny, the corrupted role that's created when a king is created. So let's kill boldly, not wrathfully. Brutus is trying to be very high minded here and make sure that no ill, nefarious motives come into this. And Cassius is just the poster boy for mixed motives. He may have some noble motives, but he's also ambitious himself and envious himself, which is what Shakespeare repeatedly makes clear in his characterization. 38:59 Erin: This is one of the moments where I think that Brutus is envious and unaware of it because he mentions envy twice in this and says he doesn't want people to think that he is envious or that they are envious. He says, you know, if we're too bloody then we're going to look like wrath and death and envy afterwards by cutting the head off and then the limbs. And then at the end of this little speech he says, this shall make our purpose necessary and not envious, which so appearing to the common eyes, we shall be called purgers, not murderers. Again, there's, there's a preoccupation with what other people think. And this repeated Idea, which I take to be pretty suggestive, you know, that we don't want to appear to be envious at all. I mean, that could. That could be legitimate. But I think Brutus doth protest too much, you know. 39:48 Wes: Yeah. And I think, well, so the way it's represented in Plutarch, the way it's represented in the end of the play. Right. Mark Antony will say, Brutus was the only one who wasn't. 39:56 Erin: You're right. 39:57 Wes: At least partly envious. And that's straight out of Plutarch. And that's the way that history is written. It makes it seem like Brutus has pure motives and Cassius has mixed motives, and the rest of them are at least partly driven not by the best motives. They might want to save the Republic, partly. But also there's other things going on. But Brutus is supposedly pure. And I think you're right to point out that Shakespeare is exploring that possibility. Is Brutus really? And even if he were. Even if Brutus were, in his own mind, purely acting out of a conception of the public good and his own virtue and honor, is that enough? Isn't he, in a way trying to be absolute himself? He's trying to be the best in one way or another, but. 40:45 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Is it possible to be as prideful as Brutus is and not be envious? And if he is a kind of mirror of Caesar in that way, I mean, we don't really see Caesar be envious, I guess. I don't really think so. But I think that there's an implication that if Brutus and Caesar are sort of of wind or something, an envious 41:06 Wes: person is worried about taking something away from another who has it. I think Brutus is worried about losing something, and that's the reputation he already has. 41:16 Erin: I see. Yeah. Which is a mysterious one because of 41:20 Wes: the letters and the right. Historically, the graffiti. It's been suggested to him, you are not really Brutus unless you act like your ancestor and stop. Your reputation is at stake here. If you don't do this, you're going to fall from this very, very high reputation that you have. And that would be the most cynical way to interpret what Brutus is doing, that it's all about maintaining his reputation. But if it is on Shakespeare's account, it is unconscious. And that's part of what Shakespeare is exploring. 41:55 Erin: The idea of being a Roman, too comes up twice in that previous speech. And that's seems to be important. Like we have to be Roman. I have to be myself if I do this. Or if I don't do this, I'm not Brutus. If I don't do this, I'm not a Roman. And yet. Yeah, I just wanted to mention, just to backtrack for one second, that he has this idea of steeling with valor, so being like a sword and basically erect and strong rather than one of the melting spirits of women. And he says, what need we any spur but our own cause to prick us to redress? So there's a, there's a slight double spur in that. So there's this inherent idea in his metaphor of drawing blood, but it's only ever metaphorical blood. And in fact, you know, Romans need all their, all their Roman blood within them to be against the bastardy of tyranny in order to successfully fight against whatever Caesar represents. And so we're going to, to spill his blood because he's not a Roman. Yeah, so it's this, this helps me, I think, see this justification a little bit more clearly because there's so much hypocrisy in Brutus without understanding that what he's trying to do is maintain this sort of ideological or the self concept, which is whole. And he's going to preserve that by any means necessary, even if it means literally punching holes in somebody, somebody else. So that's, that's helpful to me to understand, understand his psychology. 43:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think it's something we all do. I mean, it's for better or for worse. I think there are ethical theories which ground ethical action in general and a conception of identity preserving an identity, even if it's just a human identity, we cease to be human if we do certain things. And so we don't act certain ways for fear of ceasing to be human. But we also get ourselves into big trouble because we, and I think this is kind of what psychoanalysts refer to as death drive. Death drive, in a way, is about self preservation. It's about preservation of a certain identity, a certain image, even if it's at a practical level very self destructive. We want to preserve that because. Or it wants to preserve itself and it's lodged in us. Right. It doesn't want to be destroyed. So if it's an identity that is counterproductive, that's not its problem. It wants to continue to live. All right, so that is the end of part three. patreon.com subtextpodcast or doing that subscribing right here on Apple. Or maybe it's not here. Maybe you're not on Apple. But if you are on Apple, it is here. Otherwise, yeah, you can wait a week to listen to Part four. 44:39 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter NYsubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got done with part of act one, scene two for one hour now. We did a big discussion of Brutus to start things off. And then we started diving into end of the play and we were talking about the character of Caesar. So I had pointed a little bit to this idea of what Caesar do it and it's performed and the way that's dreamlike. And then the accusation against the soothsayer. And then we move to the point of view of Cassius and Brutus. Right. This is the point where Brutus says he's not gamesome enough. Quick spirit. He's not going to the football game. He's just going to go home and feel depressed. 1:14 Erin: Yeah. And he comes down to he's a Stoic. You know, they're always such fun at parties. Vexed, I am of late with passions of some difference, conceptions only proper to myself. So, you know, leave me alone to think my precious thoughts. 1:29 Wes: Poor Brutus, with himself at war, forgets the shows of love to other men. So, you know, Cassius is saying, why have you been so distant with me lately? 1:37 Erin: Yeah. 1:37 Wes: And Brutus, I'm worried, honey. I'm worried about work. 1:42 Erin: I feel like you don't have time for me anymore. 1:46 Wes: Exactly. And then Cassius says, well, I have some things I want to share with you. I've been withholding them, these worthy cogitations because you've been in such a piss poor mood, but maybe it's time to share them. And then he brings up this idea of do you know what your reputation is? And later on. Well, no, it's right here in the scene. Brutus lacks mirrors. He doesn't see how highly people think of him. And this seems to be right. This is a very similar sort of. Well, here we have flattery. And flattery is going to be another big theme in the play. Caesar's going to say later on he's absolutely immune to flattery. Decius says, actually if you want to flatter Caesar, just tell him he's immune to flattery and then he'll eat it all up. And flattery is the way you win over the crowd, right? Rhetorically. So this is all very important and this is what Cassius's project right now is with Brutus. Engage in a little flattery and see if that works. Oh Brutus, you're so high minded and honorable. Everyone thinks that and that will impel him to act according to the image in that mirror. Now I'm not so sure this is actually what motivates Brutus, but yeah, what do you think? I'm not sure what Cassius is doing is actually the big motivator. And especially since his being worried suggests that he's already in this frame of mind. 3:15 Erin: Oh, definitely. Yeah. And I think you're right. I think Brutus actually picks and chooses what he wants to from Cassius. Overall spiel. I love this idea of the mirror because yeah, it's like Brutus doesn't even have a body. He's like a brain in a vat or a microchip. Brutus seems to be all about, you know, he's cogitating because he's concerned because he's of two minds. He's at war with himself and he has to resolve this, I think into a singularity. And so in a way, Cassius's method of this mirror idea seems to be the wrong move. Caesar has statues of himself everywhere. He's populating Rome with himself. And Brutus seems to be about containment or reduction or the, or the desire to reduce himself to a single cause or a single thought. He's upset, he's melancholic, because he doesn't know what to do. He really wants to kill Caesar, but he doesn't know if he can justify it or he's really concerned about Caesar's growing power and feels conflicted about what to do. And so it seems that he needs to get to a decision. And then once he makes that decision, he then has to back it up with a lot of reasons. But like it seems that he needs to rush toward a single resolve, a single resolution. When Cassius tells him that he has a hidden worthiness, he says it is very much lamented, Brutus, that you have no such mirrors as will turn your hidden worthiness into your eye, that you might see your shadow. So the mirrors are sort of for Brutus's own benefit to see something in himself that he isn't aware of. Then Cassius goes on. I have heard where many of the best respect in Rome, except immortal Caesar, speaking of Brutus and groaning unto underneath this age's yoke, have wished that noble Brutus had his eyes. So the first part of that is about I wish you had a mirror in yourself. So that you could see inside your little nooks and crannies, something which is unknown to you. Then he does this sort of wider thing. Other people look at you with such admiration. If only you could see yourself in the eyes of others, then what you need to do will be revealed to you. And what does Brutus latch on to about the first part of that rather than the second part? 5:37 Wes: Right. 5:37 Erin: So he says, into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, that you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me? So he ignores. So this is, I think you know what you're talking about, where he's not really motivated by the flattery. He's not really motivated by this idea that other people are really, really love Brutus and really wish that he were, you know, in more control in Rome. Brutus is motivated by the thought that there might be something in him that he's not aware of. And it doesn't have to be worthiness. I mean, he's really motivated, I think, by introspection and discovering, digging up everything in himself that is in there. Because he's obsessed with this idea, I think, of self knowledge and of being as rational as possible, which means examining oneself as thoroughly as possible. And that's what he latches onto in Cassius's speech. He goes right to this, you know, what's in me that I may not know about? And therefore, like, what mischief are you up to? Because are you going to tell me there's something in me that I'm not aware of? 6:43 Wes: Yeah. So the surface content of this is everyone thinks you're so great, Brutus, and wishes that you knew you were great, right? Everyone thinks you're great, except for Caesar. Love that little parenthetical. Everyone's groaning underneath his age's yoke and wish noble Brutus had his eyes, right, to see himself. But another way of interpreting that is wishing Brutus had his eyes to see what other people see in him, which is to say, to be responsive to the crowd the way most people are, and to be responsive to the prospect of glory and the prospect of recognition, to be able to be manipulated by the crowd in the usual way into becoming a projection of their own grandiosity. Which is another way of saying to become an autocrat himself. I'm just taking that line of thought out to its most pernicious possible conclusion. Don't take all that at face value. And another way of reading this is just an even more sinister way. Cassius is, in a very subtle way, saying, look, Brutus, Caesar is becoming a tyrant. And everyone's saying, why hasn't Brutus done anything about it? Brutus is the go to guy. That's what he's doing. And then when Brutus responds and says, seek into myself for that which is not, you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me. It sounds like he's saying, you're trying to get me to think I'm great when I'm not. But maybe back to this question of flattery. I'm kind of giving another dimension to the flattery which is kind of threat, right. Brutus, the threat of loss of people's respect because he's not doing anything about Zealand. Those are two different ways of thinking about it. And I think the latter might be the thing that is more motivating for Brutus. Not that flattery is going to work on him and that Brutus wants to be seen as great in everyone's eyes or to acquire that for himself, but that he already has that and could lose it. He could be shamed by all of this. 8:46 Erin: Yeah, I think I immediately went to a sort of deeper interpretation than the one that you're pointing to. But I think that there is concern here that there is something about himself that he's not aware of, independent of this idea that people are relying on him. I think part of the reason why the flattery angle maybe isn't working and this idea of other people's eyes being Brutus's eyes doesn't work is that Brutus isn't interested in. I'm just going to say he's not interested in other people's opinion of him, though I think he is. He doesn't understand the social component of self assessment or the importance of knowing oneself in relation to others. 9:36 Wes: And that's interesting in light of the fact that Cassius says I'm going to be your mirror. You can't see yourself, so I will be your mirror here. So I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which you yet not know of. Modestly. Right. He's not going to exaggerate it. He's not going to flatter. And he'll go on and say, I'm not going to flatter you. If you know that I do fawn on men and hug them hard and after scandal them, or if you know that I profess myself in banqueting to all the rout, then hold me dangerous. So if you know me to part of this is fawning and flattery. Right. And then backstabbing after that. But he's like, you know, I'm not a flatterer. I'm going to give you an accurate representation, and I'm going to be your mirror. And I'm not just trying to manipulate you. And then there's a shouting and flourishing because we're hearing the part where Caesar first rejects the crown. And Brutus, I do fear that people choose Caesar for their king. So now we're getting into open discussion here. That's only been hinted at. And he'll go on to say, I'd rather die for the general good than have Caesar be king. And then we get Cassius kind of reposed to that, where he says he would rather die. How does he put it? Than I had as lief not be as live to be in awe of such a thing as I myself. Right? Such a thing as I myself just being another ordinary human being. And then he gives the great account of Caesar almost drowning. And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world did lose its lustre. Ye gods. It doth amaze me a man of such feeble temper should get the start of the majestic world. And then we get this idea, right? So Caesar is either an ordinary man, or he's maybe even of more feeble temper. He's epileptic. He was too exhausted to swim the river, and Cassius had to save him. And then we get this great speech. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus. And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time were masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. I don't think I ever fully understood this speech. I mean, in high school, I don't think I understood. Right. When Caesar is called a colossus, it almost sounds like he's being called a great man. But Cassius, point is, he's not a great man. He just seems like a colossus in comparison to our cowardice. He's just an ordinary guy, or maybe even less than that. But we're a bunch of sheep and cowards here in Rome and we're letting him take over. It's interesting because he moves on from this idea that he's gonna be a mirror to Brutus that's just kind of left behind and they get into what Caesar is to them. 12:23 Erin: Well, yes, but Cassius is being a mirror to Brutus in a deeper way first. I just wanna backtrack a second and address what you said. I do fear choose Caesar for their king. That's, I think, in relation to the shouting that they're hearing. And this is Brutus's interpretation. Right. But in fact, this is a misinterpretation. So these shouts are cheering for Caesar because he's refusing to be their king, 12:47 Wes: but he was loathe to reject that crown. 12:50 Erin: That's Casca's interpretation. So it is the occasion for him to come out and say what he fears. But even that statement is only in light of what he is hearing. Then Brutus launches into this whole thing about honor. And then Cassius says, I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus, as well as I do know your outward favor. I know you're an honorable guy. Well, honor is the subject of my story. So he is being a mirror to Brutus. He's basically saying, like, let me put this in a way that Brutus is going to listen, so I'm going to cast this as a story of honor. 13:24 Wes: Ah, I see. 13:25 Erin: So he's mirroring Brutus in the way that he trying to tell Brutus what he wants to hear. And Brutus is like, oh, oh, this is a story about honor. Now I'm listening. Right. 13:36 Wes: So they're being dishonored by, you know, if they're going to be subservient to someone like Caesar. 13:43 Erin: That's exactly right. And Cassius goes on to say, you know, for my single self, for me personally, I'm just one guy, you know, But I'm just saying, right. And then he tells. 13:55 Wes: Don't know about you. I don't know if you like. 13:56 Erin: Like, I don't know if you really like being someone who's dishonored, worshiping a loser. Right. But for me, for me, it's just. I'm just saying. And then he tells the whole swimming story, which is like the. The happens in this movie Gattaca, that we're. We have to cover on the podcast eventually, which I love, but basically, you know, but he's just this guy, this sick guy, and it seems like a dishonor for us to have to deal with that guy elevated above us. And repeatedly, I will say that so much of this, so much of this idea of honor is gendered too. I just want to point that out. Like, are we going to be beholden to this guy who is like a sick girl? He characterizes him womanish. Womanish, right. You know, how could Caesar be so great if I had to save him from the river? There's this idea of Manliness. This is also very appealing to Brutus, and it seems interchangeable. Manliness seems interchangeable with honor throughout. I just want to point that out because I think it's going to become more and more important as the play moves along. And as we see Portia, for instance. And even with the body of Caesar, what ends up happening to Caesar? I think there's some statements being made there. And there's something that is like rebuking on a basic manhood level. That seems to be a motivating factor for Cassius's upset over Caesar and maybe also Brutus's, you know, are we gonna be men and fight back? Are we gonna do something? Or are we just gonna accept our fate? And Calpurnia is really upset about signs. And, you know, this is later, right. But are we going to look outside and say, oh, no, all these bad omens are happening. Maybe don't go to work today. Because that seems to be something that, like, a woman will do in this play, right? Or are we going to actually take action? Are we going to be men and take action? That seems to be the kind of the binary, the implicit binary that's being set up here. So are you a real man, or are you just a sick girl? Nothing worse than a sick girl. I would hate to be one of those. So, yeah, and then we have this idea of, like, conjuring, too. But he amps it up more and more. Then he sort of gets into the perfect personal. But he uses this honor thing as a way in. And I think that. That it's connected to this idea of being a real man. 16:18 Wes: I think also at stake here, there's a little bit of what's in a name going on. 16:23 Erin: Yes. 16:24 Wes: Write them together. Yours is as fair a name which is funny. So beyond Caesar's mannish being manly or womanly or epileptic, feeble or not, there's just the fact that whoever Caesar is, this is just a role. He is just human, and this is just a role. And there's other actors in Rome. The role, you know, the executive role should never grow to encompass everything. It should be one part of the republic. So he'll say, upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he has grown so great age. Thou art shamed, Rome. Thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods. When could they say till now that talked of Rome that her wide walls encompassed but one man? So this idea that there's no room for anyone else to be a man or to be strong or an agent or an actor in light of Caesar crowding out that possibility. Caesar becoming everything now, is it Rome indeed and room enough when there is in him but only one man? So my point there, you know, there's two points I'm making. One is about this idea of Caesar's expansion and exclusion of manhood or agency and others. But also the fact that. And I think this is going to become very important, that there is no divine right. There's no essence here. Caesar just has this role on loan. And the man ought not. Right. The role. It might be great. The role might be very prestigious and important. The role of being a leader or a president or what does he have both consulships at this point? What's going on now at this point? I don't know his official title. I think he's got both consulships. 18:15 Erin: There's so much time collapsed here, too. I was trying to work out the 18:18 Wes: timeline, but in any case. Right. Yeah, he's not an emperor, but he's in danger of becoming one. And so the. The role is bigger than the man, and the two ought not to be conflated. The role is something like a social construct, and we ought not to lose sight of that fact. We ought not to treat metaphors as if. Or signs as if they are the things that they stand in for. There's a lot of that in this play and, of course, in Shakespeare's other plays. We ought not to treat the trapping, to think that the trappings of authority somehow confer some essential greatness upon a person. They're still human, all of that stuff. 18:56 Erin: Yeah. You know, the idea that Caesar just has this role, as you're calling it, there's such a. Such a dramatic irony throughout. I mean, throughout the whole play. But of course, the word Caesar will be synonymous with the role. Right? 19:11 Wes: Yes. No, he's consciously. Shakespeare makes great use of that irony in this play. 19:16 Erin: But yet. And I even love yours, is as fair a name. It literally isn't. Right. Brute. It's literally not as fair a name. And it will not start a spirit as soon as Caesar. It literally won't. Right. Caesar's ghost will come on stage. Caesar's name is in everybody's mouths all the time. So what I really like is the scale that happens over the course of this. We have this idea in scene one with the tribunes that Caesar is flying high above everybody's heads, and he's going to become. He's going to basically go out of sight and. And rain terror down on people without them knowing distance. Distance is separating him from everybody. And then this colossus thing where he's this huge body that's standing astride the city. So this is a giant man. And then it's this idea that Rome has shrunk to just this one guy. So you know, that. Then this is where Cassius says, there have been other men in Rome, basically. And one of them was a Brutus who would have brooked the eternal devil to keep his state in Rome as easily as a king. So there was the Brutus who. Who was. Who founded the Republic. There have been other people. Are you going to basically let this one man, you know, not only have his way or be just the number one guy, or just be the only guy who matters, but also kind of erase. Erase the legacy of your name and of your nobility? And this is where I'm seeing that there's this. You know, the republicans are behaving in ways which are actually more indicative, I think, of monarchy. Caesar and Antony both have this kind of divine right thing. And later, Antony, of course, will be making out a list of who's going to live and who's going to die. So there's that kind of autocratic power which is located in them, but in the republicans, there is this idea of nobility and of ancestry which seems to belie their whole bag. That seems to be the thing that's like, okay, I get, you know, that makes Brutus say, I get it. You know, I'm not gonna think about this anymore. But I hear you. And it does seem that Brutus is motivated by the. The nobility or the desire to keep alive this. This hereditary right to republicanism, to the idea that Rome has to be more than just one guy. It has to be a bunch of people. But it's Brutus's sort of divine right or his kingly cause, his honorable cause, to be the one who preserves Rome as a place for more than one guy. So he's sort of like uniquely ordained for republicanism. It's a very weird angle to go in on, but Cassius has to take it, you know, to basically get it so that Brutus will be flattered as being the equal of Caesar, but like, the equal and opposite of Caesar. 22:07 Wes: Yeah. So this appeal to honor ends with Brutus saying he'd rather be a villager than to repeat himself, a son of Rome under these hard conditions. And Cassius, I'm glad that my weak words have struck such a show of fire from Brutus. 22:21 Erin: That passes for fire, I guess. 22:23 Wes: Yeah. Right. So then we get this different Picture of how Caesar thinks of himself. This is where we will. Caesar is now passing by and Cassius and Brutus, they're planning to get a debrief from Casca and they can see something is wrong with Caesar and Calpurnia and Cicero, they look like they've just seen a ghost or something. And then we get this wonderful scene where Caesar observes to Mark Antony that Cassius has that lean and hungry look. Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek headed men and such as sleep nights. Young Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. And then Antony says, no, he's not. And then Caesar, I think he suddenly moves to the idea that, oh, if I'm calling someone dangerous, Antony might think that I have fear. And so now he has to defend himself against an accusation that Antony hasn't made, but is in a way perhaps implicit in Antony's. Oh, no, sorry, it's not implicit fear. Him, not Caesar. Yes, it's right there in the text. Sorry, sorry, Antony does say it out loud. Okay. Antony uses this word fear. And then Caesar has to respond to that. He doesn't like that accusation, or that would he were fatter. But I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know. The man I should avoid so soon is that spare Cassius. He reads much. He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men he loves. No plays as thou dost, Antony hears no music. Seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned the spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. He just. He smiles to mock. Smiling, I love it. But here we get a clear portrait of someone who is being corrupted by power to some degree. He has to have this absurd belief that he is fearless even when he's detecting danger. Of course, how would you detect danger if you didn't feel any fear? How could he possibly know Cassius is dangerous if you weren't feeling fear? That's the way a normal person would do it. And then he'll end this by saying, I rather tell thee what is to be feared than what I fear. For always I am Caesar. And this is where we get one of these several allusions, that ironic allusions that Shakespeare is making to the double meaning of the name as I am Caesar, as if he's saying, I am king, but I'm Caesar. I'm not the type of guy who could feel fear and a divinely ordained king could not either. And then another little Touch of irony. He's like, well, come over to this side because I'm deaf in this ear. So we get another. Immediately the aftermath of that is we get a little portrait of his frailty in contrast to this self conceptionist. Fearless. 25:13 Erin: Right. I mean, this is the man who crossed the Rubicon and has behaved in ways which are fearless. And he has to kind of keep that up as his body is failing. 25:21 Wes: Yeah. Have you read the Conquest of Gaul at all? 25:24 Erin: I've read parts of it. I read all of Plutarch's lives back in the day. It's been a very long time. But. 25:30 Wes: But it's a very different. Right. Yeah. It does not. This is a very different Caesar than comes across in that book or even Antony and Cleopatra. This idea of him, you know, him being kind of a little bit doddering. Right. 25:46 Erin: It makes me feel a little bit of affection for him because of the kind of the silly disjuncture between. I'm not afraid of anything. And can you also speak into this ear, please, Because I'm feeble, you know, and we've just heard Brutus say, I love the name of honor more than I fear death. You know, so there is a culture of fear as the worst thing, fear as the womanly thing. So one has to constantly pay lip service to. And that seems to be what Caesar is doing. Right. Like, I have to keep reassuring people that I don't, or I have to keep saying this out loud and hopefully it'll be true. 26:22 Wes: Could say a bit about Casca's characterization of Caesar as, you know, rejecting the crown but really wanting it. And then he has an epileptic seizure. So another pointing once again to this frailty in Caesar. And the epileptic seizure, of course, becomes the storm. And as we'll see in a. Is representative of. It's not just literally that he's sick. It has something to do with his ambition and the unnaturalness of the ambition. But I just thought we could comment briefly on this dynamic between him and the crowd, because this is another case where we're right. The crowd is the mirror, in a way. And. And then there's the question of rhetorical tricks and flattery and all that stuff. And then Casca compares it to theater performance and he does this dramatic thing where he offers up himself to have his throat cut, but he apologizes for this fit that he has. And then the wenches forgive him. Casca says, if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, it would have been the same. So something's going on here about how he Manipulates the crowd. But it's a little bit vague to me. It's Greek to me. It's a little bit vague how all that was working. 27:46 Erin: I agree. It seems like he's almost embarrassed or he realized he overplayed to the crowd with the cutting his throat thing. Like, maybe it didn't go over that well. And then when he comes to, he's like, oh, I'm sorry if I said anything inappropriate. He's testing them by seeing how far he could take it. But at the same time, the most fascinating part of this for me is that assessment that you mentioned of Casca seeing it as like a theater performance. He says if the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him according as he pleased and displeased them as they used to do, the players in the theater. I am no true man. I thought about that for a long time because I was like, this is kind of a bizarre power dynamic, universal scene. 28:29 Wes: Yeah. 28:30 Erin: What, is Caesar throwing a fit if they don't cheer for him like he's a toddler? Or does he have one of those light up applause signs like they have during studio recordings of sitcoms? I don't think so. Right. Again, this is the failure of these conspirators to give credit to Caesar's own popularity. So rather than saying, gee, how come Caesar is so appealing to these people? They're like, what did Caesar do to get them to cheer for him like that? You know? Or like, he must have given them something. He must have given them some sign that they have to be cheering for him. You know what I mean? It's this fascinating psychological reversal. It's very. To me, it's just very indicative of envy. You know, it's. It can't be. They can't be cheering for him because they're cheering for him. It has to be that Caesar is somehow getting them to cheer for him. Right. Like there's a circuit that their minds are doing which is leaving out that Caesar merely knows how to work a crowd. And it's bypassing that to say that he's somehow getting them to clap for him in a way which is manipulative in some far more straightforward way than simply he knows how to work a crowd. Again, there's a discounting of Caesar's popularity, which I think is. Is really is going to be their downfall. 29:51 Wes: Yeah. Although after Brutus's speech, the crowd is quick to turn on Caesar. I mean, it does seem in line with the whole idea of fickleness. The tribunes, Right. Bring at the beginning. And I do, I kind of take Casca's account at face value because I think that's part of the point of indicating that he's kind of dull witted as to make us believe this account more. But. Right. And so here when Brutus says he has the falling sickness, Cassius says, no, he doesn't, we all have it. And then Casca is confused by that. So that's one of the reasons he gets called stupid. But yeah, I'm still confused by the dynamic. He sees that the crowd, that Casca's theory. Right. So we can, yeah, you know, Casca's interpretation we could be skeptical of if we'd like. But he, because it is a very confusing account, he sees that the crowd was glad he refused the crown. Then he does this thing where he offers to have his throat cut, which I don't get. I don't understand why he would do that or what that means because it seems to indicate. Is he saying I'm. I don't know what the point of that is, but whatever it is, it goes too far. That's the thing that, that dramatic gesture, I mean the whole clap in hiss thing suggests he's. Yeah, he's pandering to the crowd. He's being a performer, he's very in tune with what, what it is they want. And he's trying to calibrate everything he's doing to that. But perhaps the throat cutting thing is a little bit. He's too in touch with maybe the aggressive qualities of the crowd. Right. Because it's always a double edged sword. Worship and then sacrifice. Right. So one, you know, or he's flying too high, so to speak. He's flying a little bit too high and then he has that seizure, maybe gets frustrated. 31:38 Erin: Oh, here I'm refusing this crown for your sake. What do you want to cut my throat now? You know, maybe. 31:43 Wes: Well, that's the end. That's one possible. I guess that's the idea. It just seems like a weird, weird thing for him to do because the whole point of refusing the crown is to show that he's not power hungry. 31:57 Erin: Right. But if Cask is to be believed, then he really wants it and he's upset at having to refuse it. And that's why they've all come away upset, because Caesar's pissed that. Yeah. 32:07 Wes: Oh, I figured they were upset just because of the fact that it ended with an epileptic seizure. 32:13 Erin: Yeah, that could be it too. But then why would Caesar be angry and everybody look like they were chastised by him or something. Sounds like he came off stage and was like, what do those people want from me? And started yelling at everybody because he's a little bit of a diva or something. I mean, obviously he's a huge diva, so. Another reason why I love him. 32:31 Wes: Yeah. So we don't have to pause for a long time on any given scene, but. Or part of scene two, just where we still are. But after Brutus exits. Well, Brutus thou art. Cassius says, well, Brutus, thou art noble, yet I see thy honorable metal may be wrought from that it is disposed. Therefore it is meet that noble minds keep ever with their likes. For who so firm that cannot be seduced uses this word seduction. Caesar doth bear me hard, but he loves Brutus. If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius, he should not humor me. So if I were Brutus, I wouldn't be won over by me. Cassius is basically admitting here to being a scoundrel and to actually corrupting. Right. He's right. The honorable metal is being wrought in a different right from that. It is disposed away from its true nature. This idea of nature and natural dispositions and natural causality and natural explanation is very important in this play, as in many other Shakespeare plays. But Brutus has a certain kind of character, a certain type of natural disposition, a certain metal. And Cassius is bending it to his will. But. Yeah, so I just want. That's all I wanted to say about that. Before we move on, I do want to talk about the storm quite a bit. 33:50 Erin: It. 33:50 Wes: My notes say there's a crazy storm. 33:54 Erin: Mine say man with hand on fire. 34:01 Wes: I was excited to see the. The storm in the movie, the way they would handle that. And it was pretty good. 34:06 Erin: Oh, gosh, I haven't. 34:07 Wes: But you could do more with it, obviously. 34:09 Erin: I think so. I don't remember any of that. 34:12 Wes: But if they were to do a movie today, I mean, there's so much you could do with cgi. You could really see all of these. This kind of surreal scene that's happening because it's not just any old storm. It's fire falling from the heavens and all the other stuff that they describe. But the reason why this interests me so much is because there's a series of interpretations of the meaning of the storm. Casca, Cicero, and then Cassius. Casca's naive idea, the one that Cassius is going to both Cicero in a way, and Cassius are going to scoff at, is that the storm is either caused by civil strife in heaven or the World too saucy with the gods, incenses them to send destruction. Right. The old. The gods are unhappy with us, and so they're sending destruction. And then Cicero inquires and he gets the account of. I love the line passing by for some reason is my favorite one. The he did glaze me, just being looked at and glazed upon me. 35:13 Erin: Oh, yes, yes. 35:14 Wes: Yeah. And Casca will say, don't let anyone say that these can be explained by natural reasons. You see some of this in King Lear as well and elsewhere. But this conflict between superstition and natural causality, this is kind of the pivot point at this period in history for this modern science is beginning to flourish and superstition is looking more like superstition. And he says, these are portentous things unto the climate that they point upon. So now, Casca goes on to a different idea, that there's an element of prophecy in this, let's say. And Cicero says, well, men construe things after their fashion. In other words, you're just. This is a projection of your own character or of your own fears. Cicero is a realist. He's a stoic and he's a realist. He's not like this superstitious Casca. 36:13 Erin: Yeah. Casca's list of things I just think is hilarious because it ends with the most uninteresting. He's like, there are men on fire walking up and down the streets. And last thing in the list, even at noonday, upon the marketplace, the bird of night, the owl sat, hooting, shrieking. It's like, okay, so there was an. Also an owl in the middle of the day. 36:32 Wes: Yeah. And I don't think Cicero. Yeah, I don't think Cicero believes a lot of this stuff. Yeah, the owl, sure. 36:38 Erin: But I don't. I don't think Rome Live at five is going to be, you know, like, showing footage. An owl hooting in the middle of the day. I think it might be focusing on the men on fire walking up and down the street. But 36:52 Wes: anyway, the dead coming out of their graves, as we'll learn later on 36:57 Erin: from the lions walking around the Rome Zoo was empty that day. 37:04 Wes: Cicero, I take as the second interpretation, 37:08 Erin: which is no interpretation. 37:09 Wes: Yeah. It is indeed a strange disposed time. But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves. In other words, this is all people's superstitious imagination. And then when Cassius comes, it's going to be. Casca's worried about the storm, and for Cassius is a pleasing night to Honest men who have known the earth so full of faults. So here it sounds a bit like Casca's idea that the gods are going to punish us for something we've done wrong. But I think Cassius idea is going to turn out to be that there's a certain type of fault in authority per se. This is partly why I think that the storm is Caesar's epileptic fit. And that Caesar's epileptic fit, the one that he experiences rejecting the crown, is sort of predicated on him flying too high a bit or something like that. Predicated on him being on the precipice of absolute power and then things falling apart at that point. So here's what Cassius says. Those that have known the earth so full of faults, for my part, I have walked about the streets, shows his breasts to heaven. He just says, go ahead, strike me, storm. And then Casca says, why would you tempt the heavens that way? And Cassius, you're a dull Casca. And those parts of life that should be in a Roman you do want, or else you. Or else you use not. You look pale, gaze and put on fear and cast yourself in wonder to see these strange impatience of the heavens. And then he gives his own little list of things that are happening. Old men's fools and children calculate. I love that one. Why all these things change from their ordinance, their natures. This idea of things changing their natures is what it's all about here. Which again is in parallel to. To people changing their characters, becoming corrupt. They change their natures and preformed faculties to monstrous quality. While you shall find that heaven hath infused them with these spirits to make them their instruments, to make them instruments of fear and warning under some monstrous state. Now I cask a name to thee, a man most like this dreadful night that thunders lightnings, opens graves and roars as doth the lion in the Capitol. A man no mightier than myself or me. He's on that track again. Caesar's really not that great, but yes. So Cassius directly compares Caesar to the storm. Later on, he's going to say. He's going to change his interpretation of the storm and say that what it represents is the rebellion as well. It represents the assassination. And in a way, that's one of the deeper themes in this play, is that the rebellion itself, I think, is part of your point about Brutus. But the rebellion itself kind of incorporates some of the same autocratic authoritarian qualities as the thing that they're rebelling against. 40:12 Erin: I'm interested in this idea of nature that you're talking about, or bending things from their nature. Because then he says, I know where I will wear this dagger. Then Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. So then he addresses the gods and says, therein, you gods, you make them weak, most strong therein. And you gods, you tyrants do defeat. Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron. In the corner, I have a little note to myself. Cassius loves lists, and being on a roll can be retentive to the strength of spirit. But life, being weary of these worldly bars, never lacks power to dismiss itself. 40:51 Wes: So suicide is always a possible route to freedom. 40:54 Erin: It's always a possible right. We could always free ourselves that way. That part of tyranny that I do bear, I can shake off at pleasure. So I can just shake all of this off. I could just shake life off. 41:04 Wes: So can I. So can every bondman: in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity. 41:11 Erin: That's right. I can kill myself, too. We could all kill ourselves. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the Romans are but sheep. 41:22 Wes: What trash is Rome, what rubbish and what offal when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as Caesar. What a great line. 41:32 Erin: This is all great. I just, you know, the lion thing. Yeah. So what is this about? This is about nature reflecting Caesar. Well, there's a lion walking around here because, you know, the Romans are just. I mean, I'm conflating the two, but there's an interesting contrast. This is all messaging about how the world is so bad and Caesar is causing all this, all these problems also. What can you do? Caesar's just being. Caesar's just taking advantage of the situation. You know, there's a lot of. I don't know what this is like. I can't tell quite what mood Cassius is in or whether he's sort of setting it up. So you can answer. 42:15 Wes: Yeah, I don't know if I can answer that, but I do want to emphasize, right, he makes this point, right? Things change from their ordinance, their natures and preformed faculties, Right? Because old men aren't supposed to calculate, right? By which he means, I guess, prophesy, but from the foot. From my footnote here in my text. But I just thought of. With old men, fools and children, just being really smart, doing math, like on a chalkboard, doing, like, a Good Will Hunting type of thing, and people freaked out oh my God. 42:50 Erin: What the hell is going on? 42:51 Wes: But you know. Yeah, right. The hand, when it burns, should burn up and people should be screaming in pain. But that's not happening. So it's against nature. And somehow for Cassius, that's what is monstrous. Right. What's monstrous is what stands out. It's almost like a miracle within the natural order. It stands out as not being part of the causal order or a genetic monstrosity. Right. Something has gone wrong. So when heaven makes them, uses that as instruments of fear and warning, Heaven is trying to say something unnatural is happening. And the unnatural man is the man who's most like this dreadful night is Caesar. There's something unnatural about him or there's something unnatural. And what's unnatural? Well, first of all, since authority is a social construct, it's unnatural in general. And then he's going to go on to make, make the case that by making the point that Caesar isn't a great man, that point is that no man can actually live up to the name, the role, the designation. We shouldn't equate the role and the authority of that role with the actual person. It's not of his essence, it's not of his nature. What's unnatural is when those two things get conflated. We conflate a particular person with this fantasy, right? And it can be a crowd created fantasy, the crowd mirroring back to the man some sort of monstrous self image, monstrous self conception. But if, yeah, we equate this grandiose image of power and the particular, because the role of course is powerful. But in any case, the two shouldn't be equated. And so that's where we get something perverted away from its nature. 44:43 Erin: Yeah. But then he says, well, it is natural for Caesar to have become a tyrant because the Roman people cast him in the role. 44:53 Wes: You know, that's a way of saying it's socially constructed. 44:55 Erin: Yes. 44:56 Wes: And what's socially constructed is precisely the opposite of the natural. It's not part of the essence of the thing, it's just part of. It's because the crowd believes it so that it makes it so. 45:07 Erin: But, and then I think, I think though at the end he kind of comes full circle in. There's a bit of a giving way in that, Right. You know, Caesar's this awful guy, but then also he's doing something which is natural to him. And then he says the complexion of the element and favors like the work we have in hand, most bloody, fiery and most terrible. So actually the fiery sky all of the. This is like the bloody work that we have to do in order to overcome. Right. So it comes full circle. So he sort of ends up reverse engineering the very thing that he's using as the sign of. 45:44 Wes: Yeah, he keeps changing his interpretation of the storm and where it ends up is the storm. You know, on the one hand the storm represents. And all the storm, which is to say all the unnatural, monstrous things that are happening, represent the monstrosity that is Caesar and the monstrosity that is the crown, that is the making of a monarch. The monstrosity of absolute power, let's put it this way, as opposed to power that answers the people. Although in this play the monstrous power is a function of the people in a weird sense. But anyway, he changes interpretation to say, yeah, the storm actually represents the work that we as the assassins must do. Which is, you know, an incredible pivot. 46:25 Erin: Right. 46:25 Wes: In a way you could say Cassius is sloppy. But you know, I think the real point is. Right, yeah. That the rebellion mirrors the thing that's being rebelled against. It carries the same unnatural, autocratic, authoritarian tendencies as represented by Brutus. Relationship to honor. 46:43 Erin: Yeah. What I love about this is the dramatic irony that this sets up. I mean, the fact that we know what's going to happen. The fact that even the characters on stage kind of know what's going to happen. It's as if there was a prophecy, this autocratic rule, this rule by one man and they're going to. Then, you know, and this is all part of this prophecy. And of course, by trying to eliminate, trying to eliminate a king, it produces the very thing that they tried to avoid. Right. So there's something in the circuit that Cassius's interpretation undergoes that seems to reflect this self fulfilling prophecy element of every self fulfilling prophecy. Right. And so in a way, the entire play functions that way. Or you could say the prophecy is that they're going to not be able to bring this about and die in suicide or something like that. And so it's as if the entire plot is intending to bring that about. Because it knows already what's going to happen. Because we know already what's going to happen. 47:38 Wes: So no, I think this is a really good point just because I think Shakespeare is thinking about what would have happened if Caesar had lived. You know, we know what did happen, which is just this whole sequence of events ensured that a monarchy, you know, came about and Octavius became emperor and all that stuff. What would have happened otherwise? Is it just that the conspirators made their own worst fears come true. 48:04 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let's end with worst fears come true. That's great. Okay. 48:09 Wes: Worst fears come true. All right, on that note, we'll be doing another recording of this. We could just do another two or three. I mean, we could just do this forever. Could discuss this one. Play for the most. 48:24 Erin: We'll say there will be parts three and four, and then maybe parts five and six, depending on how fast we go. 48:29 Wes: And I'm in no hurry. I don't mind if the audience doesn't like it. They can boo and hiss and then I'm gonna fall down and have a fit. That's what I'm saying. 48:38 Erin: Sounds right. 48:39 Wes: Thank you. 48:39 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook Subtext Podcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar: at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power, and his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command. For the rebels who oppose him, this identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions, and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus’s conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar, and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency, in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor. Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies, rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Wes & Erin discuss Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar. At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power. And his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command for the rebels who oppose him. This identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor. Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Today we discuss Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, where does this play stand in your rankings of Shakespeare plays? I almost said Julius Caesar plays. Are there a lot of Julius Caesar plays? 1:51 Erin: There are a couple, 1:54 Wes: yeah. Where is this one for you? What's your favorite Shakespeare play? Remind me. Much Ado. 1:59 Erin: Yeah, that's my favorite. In the, you know, personal opinion, it's not what I think is the best play, obviously, but it is my favorite. And then probably Antony and Cleopatra. 2:09 Wes: Oh, yeah. 2:10 Erin: And then. I don't know. This is in the top five for me. I love Julius Caesar. I was so excited to do this. It was my first play. I feel like it's everybody's first Shakespeare play. 2:18 Wes: Right. 2:19 Erin: Because so many people read it in school. 2:21 Wes: Well, do they do Romeo and Juliet first in high school, or do they do this one first? 2:25 Erin: My mom made me read this when I was, like, 11. This is her. I think this is her favorite Shakespeare play. 2:30 Wes: She loves trying to tell you. Was she, you know, she was worried about the. You being corrupted by the crown? 2:38 Erin: She was. 2:39 Wes: Are you wearing a little tiara at the time? 2:41 Erin: No. If anything, she was. She was trying to warn me about. About Brutus, which. No, she you know, Anthony's speech, I think, you know, we were talking probably about the art of persuasion or something. I don't know. I just. I remember reading this when I was really young and thinking that it was so amazing and that I was seeing something so. Or reading about something so profound. And then actually. Okay. And then this is. This is a side note that has nothing to do with anything, but it is funny. Okay. So when I. So my mom is not a cat person. I'm a cat person. When I was 13, because my mom felt sorry for me, she got. She let me get two cats, and it was a girl and a boy, and I was 13, so I named them Caesar and Cleopatra because I thought that was great. And I got them home. And like two days later, it finally occurred to me I was not thinking about this at all. Okay. Two days later, it occurred to me that our next door neighbors had a cat named Brutus. And Brutus was awful and used to frequently try to attack Caesar, who was a little, you know, he. He had some problems. Caesar. Cleo was really sharp. Caesar was the Caesar of Shakespeare's. Julius Caesar, a little bit in decline, had some physical problems, so. So he was a sitting duck for Brutus. 4:01 Wes: Little epilepsy. 4:02 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And couldn't hear that. Well, I don't want to hear. Anyway, it was very funny. And then it was commented on by everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone thought I had named my cat Caesar because Brutus lived next door. And it was just the most amazing coincidence. So I love this play. 4:19 Wes: Brutus isn't. Is an honorable cat. 4:22 Erin: He's really not. And Brutus, to this day is my least favorite character in all of Shakespeare. 4:27 Wes: I was curious. I almost started by asking about your opinion of Brutus because I knew it's going to be counterintuitive. What. But before that, you must have taught this play as well because you were a high school teacher. 4:41 Erin: I tried to keep it to myself, but I would always end with Dante's description of Brutus and Cassius in hell, which, you know, it's a documentary as far as I'm concerned. 4:53 Wes: Okay. This must be why I knew you would have a different take. Yeah. So we will get to this. But yeah, the. The representation, of course, of all these characters is ambiguous. Right. So we're not simply meant to take Brutus at face value. But before we get to that, just when you teach this play, what is your. Is there something that you're focused on or how is it. How do you sell it to the kids? 5:19 Erin: I think I Did it with eighth graders. So it's been a long time. But we talked about rhetoric, you know, and different rhetorical devices. And basically the focus is Brutus versus Antony in the big speeches. I taught it as a way to show them different, how different rhetorical devices work. What are rhetorical appeals? What kinds of appeals is Brutus making, and what kind of appeals is Antony making? You know, it's not like I was teaching this to a more sophisticated audience. I think part of the reason why it's used so early on is also just because it's such an accessible play. I mean, the language is not difficult, but they liked it. And there was a lot of performance in class I would use. So, you know, the boys got to. Got to get up and give their sort of interpretations of the speeches, which was really fun. And. And then always a little sociopath. Wanted to play Cassius. Not really, but, you know, 6:19 Wes: he is sort of the Iago. 6:21 Erin: Yeah. 6:21 Wes: Of the play, in a way. Well. 6:23 Erin: And all the boys would be like, I want to be Caesar. And then they would figure out that Caesar really didn't have that many lines, which is kind of funny. 6:28 Wes: Of feeble temper. You bring up these different types of rhetorical appeal, and I think that's important, apart from the fact that these speeches are so. Especially Marc Antony's speech, which is so incredible. But there's a lot of incredible speeches in here. There's the question of the effect on people and maybe their. Their character. Right. So the effects of rhetoric, the effects of other types of emotional manipulation, including Cassius's effect on Brutus, the effect of the. That the crown and power might have on Caesar by corrupting him, all these ideas of different ideas of how character might be changed by these different forces, but especially by rhetoric and especially by power. And then there seems to be a parallel to the idea that character is something like nature and that there's something unnatural when people's character is perverted. So, for instance, during the storm, all these crazy things are happening, like lions strolling in the streets and people's hands on fire and not bothering them. 7:36 Erin: I always loved the hand on fire thing. 7:38 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. So this idea of things going against their nature. Right. That things have natural dispositions to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances, and that I think Cassius suggests. There's different interpretations of the storm that I want to get into, including Casca's. But Cassius's idea seems to be that, in a way, it's representative of the Caesar's corruption of character or the corruption of Caesar's character by power. So that's the part of this that interests me. Just to bring it full, a lot of this is about character. And then I look at the interesting rhetorical part of this in light of how fixed people are in their characters, how corruptible they are. 8:20 Erin: Cassius says quite a bit about this in Act 1, Scene 3. But one of the things that I was thinking about in relationship to nature is the whole play is basically about reading or misreading or interpretation or misinterpretation. And I think the reason why, one of the reasons why Brutus really bothers me is because he really gives no quarter to those parts of human nature that are not about the rational. And the signs that you're referring to, I think, are sort of like outward expressions of this irrationality which is at the heart of the other conspirators anger against Caesar. Maybe something like, you know, the people's love for Caesar, maybe there's something irrational in that or something sort of beyond reason or super reasonable. And that idea of nature, or what one thinks of as human nature is something which I think Brutus shows time and time again that he has very little understanding of and even maybe of his own nature or his own character. He seems, on the one hand to think that he knows himself really well, and on the other hand he seems completely incapable of knowing himself. I don't know if you would agree with that. And I think that lack of awareness of hypocrisy perhaps is the central question, because we have this idea of. Of interpretation that somebody might do something which is different from how they actually feel. You know, they might behave a certain way but have secret mot. They might say something and mean something else. And that awareness of hypocrisy, of the human potential for hypocrisy or deception, is one which Brutus has no access to, even as his level of self deception is so intense. You know, maybe. Maybe we all have a bit of Brutus in us and that's why I'm rejecting. Rejecting him so strongly or dislike him so strongly. 10:07 Wes: So you don't think that only in a general honest thought and common good to all he. Sorry, I was trying to quote Mark Antony here. You don't agree with Mark Antony's assessment at the end of the play. This was the noblest Roman of them all, all the conspirators, save only he, did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only, in a general honest thought and common good to all, made one of them. His life was Gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man. What a great little speech. He's he really. If you're going to have a funeral oration, Antony's the one to hire. 10:46 Erin: Yeah, Antony is the bomb. 10:49 Wes: But so I bring that up because. Yeah. So nominally he's an honorable man. And of course, Antony famously makes use of that appellation to great effect in his very ironic funeral oration speech for Caesar, suggesting in a way. Right. It's almost like a reductio absurdum where he's like, they're honorable men, so what they must have done was right. And then he produces evidence to show that it probably wasn't the right thing, therefore they're not honorable men or something like that. Or the conclusion, it might not be that Brutus isn't honorable, but as you say, that he could be honorable and at the same time, I suppose, self deceived or being honorable might not be all it's cracked up to be. In fact, for Brutus, it seems to be. We learned during the play that he's actually quite stubborn. He's corrupted a little bit by Cassius, but then all the decisions are made by him. We're not going to kill Mark Antony, we're going to attack, we're not going to defend. Basically, Cassius loses all control and Brutus turns out to be quite stubborn. But in a way, there's something autocratic about this idea of honor. As if once I designate myself as honorable, then I can do no wrong. In just the same way that Caesar's wish is everyone's command and Caesar can't feel fear. There's a kind of parallel here between Caesar's idea that he's immovable, uncorruptible, he's like Mount Olympus, he won't even move for fear. And the self conception that Brutus has of being grounded in goodwill, honor and concern only for the public good and not motivated by envy as Cassius seems to be. 12:37 Erin: Yeah, I think that's all correct. You know, I struggle with Antony's assessment of Brutus at the end, particularly the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this is. The element's so mixed. That's the problem I have, because I think ultimately what Antony is celebrating in Brutus is that he's a man of principle. He has these principles and he lives by them and he dies by them. And that is, I suppose, the definition of honor or of being honorable. But I think that he's principled, taken to its logical extreme. So he's not a mixture of elements. He seems to me to be one element only. I mean, you know, I'm using this term elements in a very loose way. Right. But like, he's all rationality. The struggle that he has with himself in the early acts before he decides to murder Caesar seems to me to be about silencing or putting to death that part of himself that is emotional and human and leaving himself with just the part that is rational. But without the human, the rational is irrational. So we see him sort of not being tempered by emotion, not being able to express his emotions, not being able to be swayed by any sort of human feeling beyond what he thinks is right. And there is something admirable about that. I think Antony is right to celebrate Brutus in a way, but the way that he chooses to celebrate him, by these elements being mixed, this idea that Brutus is this sort of perfectly balanced human being, I think is the wrong thing to celebrate about him. I think he's an imbalanced human being who is something a little inhuman about him. A little robotic, maybe. 14:22 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I didn't. I didn't see him as hyper rational, per se. So. Yeah. So now the question is. Yeah. How do we characterize Brutus's tragic flaw, so to speak? Is it because he doesn't fully understand his own motives? I'm inclined to think that he does have the right motives, or at least let's grant that for the sake of argument. Right. That he does have honorable motives. But somehow that's not enough. 14:51 Erin: Well, what would those honorable motives be? 14:53 Wes: That Caesar was ambitious. Caesar was going to become a tyrant. Caesar was going to become a dictator. They're going to save the republic. So that's one question. Are his motives fully honorable or are they mixed? And Cassius, you might say they're mixed. There's obvious envy there. And even when Cassius tries to express the same sort of point as Brutus, which is we shouldn't treat a human being as if they were a God, he puts it in these terms. I would rather die than worship someone who is like me or Caesar. Caesar is no better than me. Why should he be king and not me? Right. You get little hints that Cassius is actually driven by envy. And this is the point that Antony is making at the end of the play, which is that Brutus is envy free. And I think that's probably right. So the flaw lies elsewhere. It's a much more obvious flaw with Cassius than with Brutus. And I think the idea with Brutus is that it doesn't matter if you're principled and you're not envious and you have the public good purely in mind. But why? That's the question. Why is that? I mean, in this case, things don't go well. There's something to be said for execution. And a lot of the poor execution is, like I said, Brutus's fault, like not killing Marc Antony up front and all that stuff which he does out of. Because he wants to be principled. So maybe the idea is at the point where you descend to revolutionary violence or rebellion, then you're playing by different rules. And so if you say I'm such an honorable man that I. Honorable man that I need to upend the current order, then the rules don't translate. The honorable man rules don't translate into the domain of rebellion, where suddenly there's no central power and it's a struggle for power. It's a much different world than in a world where the law is settled. And. Do you know what I mean? 16:56 Erin: Yes. Regarding this envy question, I think it's possible to read Brutus's motives as being entirely honorable. I do, however, think that he betrays signs of envy, but these are unknown to him. He's too unself aware to know that he envies Caesar. And I think that he, in many ways, is a mirror of Caesar. He has many of the same qualities, which I think you've already alluded to. Or they're sort of like the same type of quality, maybe in theory, but just vastly different expressions of the same qualities. 17:31 Wes: Well, Caesar sees himself as a realist and a pragmatist in the beginning. Right. He's not superstitious. Is that the idea? 17:38 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they're, you know, they have these sort of mirrored. Like the play structurally sets them up in these mirrored ways. Like we see them with their wives, where their wives are both telling them, you know, not to do something, and then they do it, or to do something and, you know, to beg them something, and they don't fully listen. I think there are a lot of reasons why Brutus should be or is envious of Caesar. But the main argument for that I could think of is simply that Cassius's appeal to Brutus works. Cassius is aware of his own envy, and he uses tactics which would incite envy in Brutus to get Brutus to act. 18:20 Wes: Brutus is a mirror of Caesar. And then something about, oh, Brutus. 18:23 Erin: Yeah. I had written down a list of things. 18:25 Wes: Cassius being aware of his envy. 18:27 Erin: But here's my list. Yes. Yeah, I had a list of things they had in common. Okay. They both can't sleep. That's the thing I noticed first. I'm just like them, Caesar, just like us. This is more structural but like when they both greet the same group of men, you know, to Brutus, they're conspirators. Caesar greets them as friends. They both are vain. Brutus is vain. Brutus is extremely vain and self centered which is another reason why I think he is prone to envy. And Cassius knows this and exploits it. And Cassius says that basically Brutus is noble but that because Brutus hasn't surrounded himself by other noble people, he's still capable of being infused with a little bit of envy. And that's exactly what Cassius does. So I think it's there. I think it's there. And Brutus is just so. His belief in his own high mindedness is so, so much about him sort of having these pure motives. But what it reveals to me is that he has an incredibly high opinion of himself and that it bothers him that Caesar is elevated above him. And he sees himself in this way which is similar to like a, like a divine kingship, only it's a sort of divine deposing of kings. Right. He sees himself as part of a lineage. He has the same name and is the ancestor of the man who killed. Is it Cato or somebody else? He killed somebody and established the republic. And so he sees himself as having almost like a divine right of king deposing in the same way that Caesar with this sort of focus on making sure that Antony, you know, touches Calpurnia during the race. There's definitely. I think one of the reasons why he's causing people to get nervous is that there's this focus on an heir and he feels the lack of an heir. And I think that is listing towards meaning that he wants to establish an empire and a dynasty and to have someone take over the throne after him as a traditional king would. So yeah, but I just think. I think that Brutus has very little self knowledge because he pushes out of his head anything which he deems unknowable. You know, lacking in nobility or high mindedness. And I think is. He's just not aware of these parts of himself that are ugly. 20:47 Wes: Yeah, I don't see him as envious or vain or self centered in a way. Not exactly. I think he's. Well, there's that Element of melancholy. 20:57 Erin: Everything he says, all his speeches, I, I, I. Seriously, it's in there. 21:03 Wes: I think, well, if you're as great as him, you know, you talk about yourself all the time. 21:09 Erin: What has he done? Nothing. 21:12 Wes: Just kidding. So he's just a great, he's just a great guy. Listeners can't see that. Erin is rolling her eyes. So I think I share your opinion in kind of a vague sense of there's something he's missing. There's something, there's a kind of obtuseness. I think it does have something to do with rationality, but that's not entirely it. I don't think being hyper rational is exactly the, the problem. I think it is probably there's something he doesn't know about himself, but I can say that about everyone in the play. I think it ultimately comes down to this reliance on the idea of being honorable and the pitfalls of that, as I said before, and that's something, of course, that Marc Antony makes great use of. So there is something almost autocratic about the concept of honor. Honor is supposed to be this kind of immunity amulet, immunity idol for those who watch Survivor. He can't be voted off the island if he has it, so he can do no wrong if he's honorable, which of course is not the case. But. 22:21 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think at the base of a lot of his speeches are circular logic, syllogisms, stuff like that, where things don't quite line up. So I think you're right that, like, there's a, you know, I'm honorable because I'm honorable. You know, I mean, he says literally at one point, believe me, for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe something. 22:49 Wes: Yes, exactly. It's supposed to be this mark of credibility. And that's, of course, you know, that's his speech that precedes Antony's speech, and that's what Antony fixes on and just slaughters him with that whole honorable idea. But, you know, and the idea of syllogism, I see that in his, like, let's not do an oath speech. 23:10 Erin: Yes. 23:10 Wes: In his garden with the others. Because, you know, oaths are for people who are essentially dishonest. You wouldn't need an oath if you weren't defective in some way and you wouldn't even be a Roman if you broke a promise. So there's that circularity. It's almost like it's about identity and about flawlessness. 23:30 Erin: That's right. 23:31 Wes: Whereas everyone's motives in a Sense are mixed. And maybe that's part of your point, you know, saying that he has envy. No one escapes that entirely. He's just such a goody two shoes. 23:44 Erin: Well, exactly, exactly. And he doesn't. People's bad motives being invisible to him means that he also has bad motives that are invisible to him. Right. So his idea is like, oh, I have a lot of these good reasons. What I'm going to do is I'm going to write them down and make a list of them. And then you common people who are so rational, because I'm going to project my belief in my own rationality onto you guys, you're going to read this list and be convinced because I have a lot of great arguments. And Antony, who I think, you know, you mentioned that you think that pretty much every character in the play has things about themselves that they're not aware of. And I think that's probably right. But I think Antony is the most aware of. He has the most self awareness, I think, of anybody, of any character in the play. And Antony is just like, okay, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to put on a huge show here because I know what people are really like. People really want to show. People really want to be moved emotionally. And nobody's going to take the time to read the 95 theses that he's just nailed to the door of, you know. 24:44 Wes: Yeah, but Antony is just a manipulator in that. He's just a cold coordinated manipulator that's. 24:52 Erin: He knows how to deal with people, you know, I mean his. I'm. 24:55 Wes: We're not. 24:55 Erin: I'm just talking about his motives. I'm saying, like he knows what people are. Like he knows how to manipulate people because he knows people. 25:02 Wes: He's. He parties all the time. 25:04 Erin: Yeah, he's the best. 25:06 Wes: Caesar's like, I can't believe Antony's up already. 25:09 Erin: Exactly. 25:10 Wes: Parties every night. No, I mean literally, he says, I 25:14 Erin: mean manipulation in itself is not a good thing, but in order to be successful at it, I mean, this is one of the things that. I think this will lead us right to the beginning of the play. Actually. This is one of the things that all the conspirators seem to. It's almost like being a Republican means not understanding people weirdly. Whereas, you know, having a cult of personality. 25:32 Wes: Are you a monarchist or something? What the hell, of course I am. 25:35 Erin: I'm Catholic. You know, this is why we shouldn't be allowed into this country. No, no, but like Having a cult of personality around you means you understand people. It's like sort of proof of its own success. I mean, nobody ever talks about the successful stuff that Caesar has done to get to this point. Most notably the battles that he's won and the incredible mind he has in that regard. But merely being super popular, it's its own justification, in a way that calling yourself honorable is not its own justification. Popularity is something which is its own proof of something. It is its own circular logic. You're popular because people like you. That's its own. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm sorry. 26:21 Wes: If this were high school, we know that Marc Antony is in the jock, popular jock crowd. But surprising genius is Brutus just a huge nerd. Yeah, Brutus and Cassius are nerds. This is revenge of the nerds. 26:39 Erin: Right? I mean, I think this is different. This is a little saying. High school puts it in a slightly different. I get your point. One can be popular and people don't necessarily have to like you. But Caesar is beloved. That's the thing. And there is a refusal at the beginning to recognize that he is beloved actually by the Republicans. There's a lack of understanding of the will of the people and the fact that they have seemingly anointed this guy. I mean, I'm not saying that he. That's proof that he should be dictator for life. I'm just saying that that means he has something that they don't have. Right. He has the love of the people, they don't. He's the one who everybody is celebrating. They're not. 27:23 Wes: Yeah, well, and before him, though, Pompey. Just to get us into this first scene. Pompey, right. Pompey was the one. So the first scene seems to suggest that it's. The people are fickle and easily manipulated. At least that's the opinion of the tribunes. 27:40 Erin: That's right. And there's a tremendous amount of snobbery of all the Republicans towards the people. Casca most notably discussing the reaction of the people when Caesar refuses the coronet. I won't say crown, because Casca corrects himself and says this was just a coronet. Let's get our facts straight here, people. It wasn't a crown. 28:02 Wes: Casca, who's, by the way, putting on airs as if he were a commoner, which is right. He talks as if he's a commoner. He talks as if he's in a slightly lower class English register. And in a way, Cassius and Brutus make note of this Brutus says he's grown blunt. I mean, this guy used to be really smart. Now he acts like an idiot. And Cassius says he's just putting that on in order to communicate with people better. It's sauce to his wit or something like that. 28:30 Erin: Something I made note of because Brutus. 28:33 Wes: Sort of thing that. Yeah, Brutus can't do. But it's a particular. You know, it's a very politician type of thing. I'm gonna talk like the common person. 28:39 Erin: Yeah. And Brutus doesn't even understand what Casca's doing in that moment. Like, Cassius has to explain it to him. 28:45 Wes: Although I think he does kind of turn out to be an idiot, though. Yes, Casca does. But. 28:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 28:52 Wes: And Cassius will accuse him of that later on because when they talk about the storm, I think it becomes clear that. But Casca's a bit. He's not the brightest guy and he's quite superstitious. And that's where Cassius makes that he says, calls him dull, I think is the word that he uses. But, yeah. So you're saying in this scene, the tribunes. There's the snobbery of the tribunes, which seems pretty. Yeah. Seems pretty clearly that Shakespeare meant to convey that. Right. 29:20 Erin: Yeah. Even though this cobbler, the mender of bad soles. The mender of bad souls is like being pretty funny, being pretty sophisticated. You know, this is the first instance, you know, as usual, in this little first scene, which doesn't feature the main characters, all of the themes are being smuggled in. And so we have this, you know, the Bad Souls homonym. Because he's a cobbler, there's a misinterpretation that results from it. So, you know, the language that produces confusion or the things which have multiple meanings and the tribunes don't. It's unclear if they're just dumb or if they just don't expect this regular person to be able to make puns like that or to joke in that way. He makes another joke and says that they're going through the streets in celebration of Caesar. To. This cobbler says to wear out people's shoes. Like, he wants to get more work, so he wants everybody to go out and parade to make more work. And then he says, you know, but seriously, we're were on holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph. Which is just a wonderful, funny combination of sort of truth and humor in that these holidays, they generate revenue. You know, the regular people love holidays like this because they're Good for business. Right. One of the many reasons why maybe Caesar is so popular, but. Yeah. And then immediately Marullus says, you know, you blocks, you, stones, you worse than senseless things, and starts rebuking them because they're so dumb. But they seem to know, you know, that kind of joking. And then the idea that the holiday is good for business and he's just leading people out to wear out their shoes shows a level of sophistication which nobody in the play seems to give credit to the plebs for. 31:07 Wes: Yeah, right. He makes a joke, he's gonna cobble them. He's gonna recover them in the way that he recovers old shoes. He's gonna fix them, so. Cause presumably they're worn out in the. In some sense, the Republic is worn out. But I do think, though, I think that no one really gets an unambiguous representation in this play. And that includes the plebeians. 31:31 Erin: That's right. 31:32 Wes: I think there is something sinister. Right. So they're celebrating. There's a kind of manic quality to what they're doing. And I think part of the mechanism of tyranny is, in a way, they project that sort of grandiose element into a leader, and that's what they kind of want. They want an authoritarian. They want a strong man. And that seems to be consistent with several other scenes in the play. There's kind of a. They even say it, right, When Mark Antony persuades everyone, let's make Mark Antony king. Right. Do you remember that from the crowd? 32:08 Erin: Yep. 32:09 Wes: There's an immediate reaching for, 32:16 Erin: sorry, is he single? 32:18 Wes: You right now, dressed as an ancient Roman commoner, yelling from the crowd. This urge to vest all authority in a figure with whom you can identify with a strong leader. I think that's part of this. So they're joking around, but the manic quality of that reflects their. And their urge to have a holiday and their urge to celebrate. It's more than, oh, we've had a hard day at work and now let's let go. Which I think is what one of them implies at one point. It's not just about, we work hard and now we need to let go. It's also, let's eject our. You know, we're working class and we're not going to. Obviously, none of us is going to be king, but let's enjoy that vicariously. Let's enjoy our own ambition vicariously through another. Let's have that feeling of triumph. 33:15 Erin: I like that characterization because I think it aligns with the dressing up the statue, you know, there's a manic quality to that. 33:22 Wes: Right. 33:23 Erin: We're gonna take these statues and dress them even more as if it were the real guy. And then the desire of Flavius and Marullus to disrobe the image is, you know, revealing that Caesar has no clothes taking off. 33:40 Wes: Well, also, Flavius compares them to feathers. Right. So Caesar is going to soar unless they can pluck those feathers. So the adornments off the statues. 33:51 Erin: That's right. I spent some time with that metaphor because I wasn't sure if the feathers were his supporters or the robes. There's ceremonies, I think there's scarves. They're called a couple different things, but I think scarves, okay. The note tells me so I wasn't sure. But it's interesting either way because if the feathers are his supporters, the people, then that metaphor doesn't really work. And if they're the scarves, which are lentils, why? Well, because they're. 34:25 Wes: Why doesn't it work? 34:26 Erin: Because the people are part of him. They're part of his body. So the idea that he's so remote and making himself so far above people, really, he's like a. He's like a huge plane full of people. He's taking them with him in a way, or they're part of him. Scarves, it's a little bit different, but it's. But still the scarves are bestowed upon him by the people. I mean, there is this question throughout of where Caesar gets his authority from, but they seem to be confirming that he's getting some kind of authority from the people, even as they are in this metaphor, implying that he's soaring high above the people. 35:01 Wes: And yeah, Cassius makes the point that Caesar gets his power from Romans being servile and Romans being sheep. So it's not in his. It's not something that's just a property of him. Right. It's purely circumstantial or it's socially constructed or role oriented. Right. There's going to be a lot of that in this. Right. The trappings, the same sort of thing as in King Lear. These roles that they have don't reflect their own essences. They're constructed out of human relationships and so on. In particular, what Cassius wants to say is that there's nothing great about Caesar. He just looks great because people behave in a servile, worshipful way towards him. So their worship is the thing that makes him sore. And so the images, the robes on the statues reflect that. Right. It's about the imagination. They call the statues images. It's about creating this imaginary fantasy and then behaving as if it were true. And that's where any type of authority, of course, comes from. It's like an implicit compact. If people weren't habituated to saying yes to the person in authority, if they just said no, then the authority would. Would cease to exist. So Cassius is right about that. And there's a kind of magic to it. It almost feels magical. In the next scene, we're going to get basically, Caesar's wish being his command, right? It feels almost like magic. Caesar says it, it's done. I forget how Mark Antony puts that exactly. Or Casca. Caesar speaks, right? And then the music immediately ceases. And then he calls the soothsayer a dreamer. But in a way, he's a dreamer, right? It's in dreams that our wishes, that the landscape is just immediately shaped by one's will or one's wish. To be. To have that much power is almost to be in a dreamlike situation. And then, of course, the paranoia naturally sets in. 37:07 Erin: The environment is responsive to Caesar in the same way that it's responsive when Macbeth murders Duncan, if we want to interpret it that way. But here we are given an interpretation for the omens and the portents that are. That are going to follow, but we're given it beforehand. So Marullus says, when he rebukes the plebs, run to your houses, fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude. Just wanted to point that out because before anything actually happens, Marullus calls in a plague, basically, and says, you know, you're going to be punished for being so inconstant in your celebration of Caesar, of switching your allegiance so quickly from Pompey to Caesar. So we're given a proleptic interpretation of what's about to happen. But insofar as Caesar's dreams can enter reality, shall we say, it does seem that he has an effect. Or his. His impending murder does have a real world effect, in the same way that the environment responds at the death of Duncan in Macbeth. And they're similar, actually descriptions to the omens in Caesar and the responsive nature in Macbeth to Duncan's death. 38:27 Wes: Yeah. So as I've said, right, Caesar speaks and then the music stops. And then he does that thing with Calpurnia, stand in Antonius' way so he can get you pregnant by touching you 38:41 Erin: as he runs, by telling you, Antony is the man, he's the man. 38:46 Wes: He just has to look at you and you might get pregnant. But yeah. And then, Antony, when Caesar says do this, it is performed. This, I think, must be the source of all the kind of way Caesar's represented in the popular imagination for centuries to come. And various films, right. Caesar says it, and then it's immediately performed. I think this is the source of that idea of what Caesar was. And of course, it's not even. In many cases, Caesar never was emperor, but it's the characterizing the later Caesars, later emperors, as having that kind of quality to them. There is, by the way, the film, the 1953 film, which is great. I'm like. There's these statues of, like, Marcus Aurelius and what's Hadrian? And I'm just like, oh, my God. 39:46 Erin: Those are not, you know, most. 39:49 Wes: Historically, it's like putting a statue of Barack Obama in a. You know, In the Civil. Lincoln's office in a Civil War movie. But, yeah. 40:07 Erin: Well, otherwise, what's Lincoln's motivation? He has nothing to do. 40:13 Wes: So it's a great start to the characterization of Caesar. Although he doesn't come across as the. He does come across as kind of feeble, I think, in the way that. No offense to the monarchist here, but in the way that Cassius suggests. And the first mistake, of course, he makes is to. He gets the soothsayer in this great iconic line, beware the Ides of March. And then he asks, what man is that? And Brutus answers the wrong question. Well, he says, a soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. He doesn't say, oh, yeah, it's this guy over here. It's a soothsayer guy who. He repeats the line as if Caesar can't hear, and then Caesar wants to see him. As if. I think maybe the idea is the guy won't have the courage to say it to his face. And the soothsayer says it again to his face. And then. I just love this line. He is a dreamer. Let us leave him pass. Because, of course, as I've said, in a way, Caesar is the dreamer in the sense that he is the one for whom wishes immediately become realities. 41:17 Erin: I don't know if I should throw this at you, but I. Anticipating that you would not like my. 41:21 Wes: Just. Just hand it. Hand it to me. 41:28 Erin: Anticipating that you would not like my love of Caesar, I brought a friend to help me make the case that Caesar is. 41:39 Wes: Oh, is it Harold? Harold Bloom? 41:41 Erin: Of course it is. 41:42 Wes: I thought you were gonna hold up. Plutarch's. Lives. 41:43 Erin: Yeah, I could have brought that. 41:47 Wes: Which of course is his source material. I love to imagine Shakespeare reading the Life of Brutus, the Life of Caesar, the Life of. Who's the third guy? Mark Antony and just getting a play out of it, but go ahead. 42:02 Erin: He says that Shakespeare is showing a Caesar in decline and he has a plausible mixture of grandeurs and weaknesses. Basically this is just a love letter. Bloom's whole reading of Julius Caesar is a love letter to Caesar. And he says Caesar's greatness is not in question, whatever his decline and however one reacts to his, his royal ambitions. Caesar is the grandest figure Shakespeare will ever represent. Person of most historical importance. Though sometimes silly, even fatuous, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is an immensely sympathetic character, benign yet dangerous. He is of course self centered and always conscious of being Caesar, perhaps even sensing his deification in advance. And though he can be very blind, his estimate of Cassius shows him to be the best analyst of another human being in all of Shakespeare. Caesar is accurate and Antony is not about Cassius. He has this. The same speech indicates one of several gathering infirmities, deafness and the increasing tendency for Caesar to regard himself in the third person. But basically I was fascinated to reread that because he reads Brutus's dislike of Caesar as envy and also as an Oedipal conflict. But, and says like, you know, the Oedipal conflict in Hamlet is nothing compared to the Oedipal conflict between Brutus and Caesar. It's like okay, Harold Bloom, but he sort of casts aside all of Caesar's infirmities and believes that he is this great character which I don't fully see on the page. Caesar's not listening to the warning. His vanity, his fatuousness, all of that is dismissed by Harold Bloom. And Harold Bloom is just like, oh, he's still amazing. He's still the greatest. 43:45 Wes: Yeah, I kind of think Harold Bloom is like the Caesar of Shakespeare. 43:48 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Like of course he's going to love Caesar. Harold Bloom is Caesar. 43:54 Wes: Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't think Caesar is really well characterized in the play. He's kind of got a bit part. 44:04 Erin: Oh, I know it was in relation to you saying that he's. His characterization as including the tendency to speak of himself as a third person, which Bloom points to. But what you had pointed to here, do this, it is performed, you know, the grandeur of his own self conception. 44:24 Wes: Well also his idea that he's fearless, which will come across here. 44:28 Erin: Right, right. 44:29 Wes: Because he's gonna say Cassius is dangerous, but Somehow he can detect danger without feeling fearful. This becomes a very important idea that's repeated in the play. And it's very much parallel to Brutus's idea that he's honorable. These, in a way, are supposed to form the immovable substance of these characters and ground a certain kind of autocratic attitude that they both share as you point their mirrors at each other. In a way. Yeah. I honestly don't think that Caesar is well characterized. And I don't. Not well characterized. Like he didn't do a good job. But I just don't think we get that much of Caesar's character. We see him worried about what's going down. 45:11 Erin: I don't think you can show that much of Caesar and have the play work. It's important that he's not seen too much or else too much might be revealed of him. And we can get a firmer grasp on what he's really like and then have too much sympathy for one side or the other, maybe. I mean, the whole play is obsessed with him constantly. You know, he. He. What's the expression? He lives rent free in everybody's head, you know, long after he's dead. So I think that shows enough or says more about him than his own person does. And I think that's. That's important too, is that he has to be more than his own person. He's more than just this guy with lines. He's an idea. He's a. He's Brutus's evil spirit, you know, which. Which sort of implies that he's like an extension of Brutus in a way or. Yeah. Brutus's mirror. 46:00 Wes: Brutus is his angel, as Marc Antony said. 46:03 Erin: Right. 46:03 Wes: The play should have been called Brutus, of course. No, it's just, you know, he needed two words for the. For the title. What are you gonna. You gonna call it, Marcus? Brutus doesn't work. Brutus. Caesar. Brutus Caesar. 46:21 Erin: Brutus Caesar. 46:22 Wes: Right. Of course. It's. Yeah. Brutus is the protagonist of the play and a tragic protagonist with Cassius as his Iago and Caesar's just Desdemona. 46:39 Erin: That's really good. 46:40 Wes: Except that Brutus doesn't get all jealous. He's, you know. Well, as you said, more robotic. Robotic about it. 46:47 Erin: Yeah. 46:48 Wes: He gets worried. Brutus is. I see him as he is, you know, I see what you're saying about him because he's so. There's the melancholic aspect and then there's him being in his head. He's kind of in his own thoughts all the Time. He's remote, and that's really important. 47:03 Erin: He doesn't sing songs or play games like Antony. 47:06 Wes: That's right. Wait, is that. No, he says that about Cassius. 47:11 Erin: No, no, no. I do lack some things. 47:14 Wes: Caesar says that about Brutus. 47:15 Erin: No, no, Antony. Brutus says that about Antony. Brutus doesn't know how to have fun. He doesn't have that quick spirit. He says that Antony has. He doesn't even watch the race. Antony's out there having fun. 47:27 Wes: Well, Brutus says, I'm not, like, I'm not into sports, right? So I. So I'm not gonna go see the race. But I think Caesar says to. To Marc Antony about Cassius that, you know, he doesn't go see plays, right? 47:41 Erin: Oh, yes. 47:41 Wes: Am I just getting that wrong? Yeah, yeah. 47:43 Erin: But that. That's. That's a slightly different thing. 47:45 Wes: He's too thin, and he's not into partying and having fun like you, Marc Antony. 47:51 Erin: That's right. 47:52 Wes: Yeah. I told you. These are just the nerds. It's Revenge of the Nerds. All right, so we. Unfortunately, we have to stop part one there. I don't know how many recordings we're gonna do of this, but we're gonna do at least two. I think things will speed up. It's kind of like Jaws, right? Once they set out for the shark, it's. It's not so, you know, once we get into all the military stuff, the play is kind of over already. But I think the play actually starts to struggle at that point. [email protected] Otherwise, you can wait a week. Thank you. 48:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1949 film the Third man, directed by Carol Reed. I think we were still in the middle of a conversation about language and the confusions of location that it causes in the film, the difficulty that it makes understanding and people being able to make themselves understood to each other, the repeated plays on people's names. And this comes up too, in Holly's conversations with Anna. I mean, he first sees her on stage performing, of course, in German, and says that he understood what was going on, but it's clear that he's kind of lying or he's just, you know, he really doesn't know German at all, so he couldn't possibly have understood what was happening. And later he wants to run lines with her. Right. And he doesn't even understand the difference in the script that she has between the stage directions and the actual cue that she needs. You know, the line before hers. There's a huge disconnect between them, which seems to be sort of embodied in this difficulty that he has with German. Even though she's not even Austrian, she's supposed to be Czechoslovakian. So this connection with language, the stage, Holly, as I mentioned in the last part, calling the army money stage money, and maybe even something like what you're calling the romance of post war Vienna. Is there something stagey about the whole place? Because it's. It's being staged in another sense of the term. But it just seems that Vienna is this particular nexus which is designed for misunderstanding, and that these misunderstandings seem to be the. The only people that could thrive in these types of conditions are people who make a living in misunderstanding or in adulteration of language or in lying and manipulation of language. Maybe these army forces, too, are a little bit implicated in that, though not as. Not as strongly. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything more that we could say about that, but I just wanted to mention the importance too, of the Stage quality and how it seems to give us an early indication that the relationship between Holly and Anna is not going to work out well. 2:40 Wes: Yeah, that's an interesting relationship because, well, they think Harry is dead. Of course, it's a little fast. 2:51 Erin: One other thing I just wanted to mention too, is the papers. You need these papers to walk around the city. And that's another thing where you have like, you know, you have papers written in a certain language which claims you. Certain country. You know, again, it's language needing a script, needing a little document, a little, you know, novelette to carry around with you. And all of that too, seeming stagey or staged because it requires props and the sort of falsification that Harry can provide Anna and the help that he could provide her to make her props check out is far more useful, though it has an expiration date. It's far more useful to her than Holly not even being able to help her run her lines for her performance. One of them understands the stage and the other one doesn't. 3:40 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think there's something here about Holly is, in a way, living out his fantasy, which is to be an outlaw in a frontier situation, in a wild west type of situation. And he's gonna find out that it's not as great as he thought it was. It's much more sinister and much less romantic. So the romance, in a way, is the right. The quote unquote propaganda and the false identity, I think, which is part of what you're getting at, the staged thing. And that's what Holly is in the business of doing. And the gunfight, so to speak. What would be the big showdown between him and the sheriff? But of course, the sheriff is really the bad guy. Turns out to be. It's a showdown with his friend and he's more in the position of the sheriff. But it doesn't turn into a gunfight. Well, I mean, it does in the very end. On the Ferris wheel at least. It's just a speech. It's a battle of words. And the winner is the one who can defeat the other with a kind of disillusionment. So we find out that Harry's big superpower is just to be ruthlessly, remorselessly amoral. And he gives that big speech with a lot of great lines. I don't know, should we talk about that now or do we want to? 4:58 Erin: Yeah, let's talk about Harry. We're just wild about Harry. 5:04 Wes: So he doesn't even really seem to care about Anna that much. Even as he traces a heart and Anna's name in the window. In the steam of the window, more empty words. Ferris wheel, carriage. Yeah, and then that's what you know. And then Holly accuses him of that, you know, not actually caring about Anna. And Harry says he has a lot on his mind. So his schemes, his rackets are bigger than anything else. They're bigger than any particular relationship, whether with Anna or with Holly. Similarly, Holly will accuse him of betraying Anna. So he's trading safety in the Russian zone for giving her up. At a certain point, Harry gives a speech which seems designed to wisen up the kind of guy like Holly, who's kind of immersed in these fantasies of cowboys and Indians and sheriffs and all that. He'll say, what do you want me to do? Do you expect me to give myself up? Holly says, why not? Harry says, it's a far better thing that I do. Holly, you and I aren't heroes. The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories. I've got to be careful. And then when Holly asks the question about what? About the victims of your racket. Harry says, would you feel any pity if one of these dots. He's pointing at people down below. If one of those dots stopped moving forever. If I offered you $20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. That's when taxes were a lot higher, I think. So if you're going to murder people for 20,000 a pop, yeah, it's a lot less enticing if there's a lot of tax. What's the marginal tax rate? And then there's some suggestion that he'll kill Holly right there, right? I carry a gun. I don't think they'd look for a bullet wound after you hit that ground. And then he backs off that as though I would do anything to you or you to me. And then finally we get this bit about governments. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. So why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and so have I. So he rationalizes his amorality and his exploitation by way of comparison to governments that he thinks his claim is that really the governments per se are just exploitative. And so why shouldn't he be? Why shouldn't he put himself in that same position? 7:47 Erin: I had forgotten that he quotes A Tale of Two Cities there. He's referencing the end of A Tale of Two Cities, which is a moment of sacrifice, right? One character is dying in place of another. And he says, this is far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known. Something like that. Anyway, so the last lines of the book, and it's a moment of sacrifice. And so he's saying that. He's quoting that ironically, as if to say that it's sacrifice that's the real racket. And of course, another little piece of novelistic claptrap or something like that, right? A sort of idealized fantasy kind of relationship where one man is sacrificing himself for another. Maybe something like what happens probably in Holly's types of novels, his pulp novels, certainly, if he's trying to avenge his best friend, you know, Right. 8:41 Wes: If the outlaw is your hero in one of these novels, you are making the similar sort of argument, which is that the institutions are so corrupt that vigilante justice is the way to go, right. And then one can make a similar sort of accusation against morality, per se. Morality is the racket, right? Altruism is the racket. People are only pretending they're hypocrites and it's just a cover for exploitation. That's how you be a cynic and become enough of a cynic to steal penicillin from kids, right? 9:12 Erin: Well, the $20,000 for every dot underneath the Ferris wheel. You know, I was trying to, like, figure out this whole third man thing. You know, is there the significance to the third man? And I had always heard the third man in relationship to the idea of this phenomenon where people would be in dire straits and then someone would show up to assist them, like that would provide assistance that they would either actually physically see or just feel the presence of another person that gave them the strength to go on, say, if they were dying in the middle of the wilderness or something like that, in these really life or death circumstances where it's almost like someone, a force is sort of intervening almost like narratologically in their story to help them continue their story, to help them live this moment. Made me think of the third person where Harry, as a black marketeer, he's the third man in a transaction, in this economic transaction where he's intervening economically between the buyer and the seller. So he's like a middleman. He's a third man in this regard. Rather than being a third man in this way that people are describing where it's almost like an angel or a divine presence is coming down to help them. He's coming in and he's intervening in this transaction to estrange these two sides from each other so that he could profit off of the, you know, the difference. And he's also selling these tainted goods too. So he's degrading every part of this interaction and maybe even. Even doing something like, you know, changing the narration to suit him, changing the arc of the story so that both sides get especially the receiving end. Right. In terms of what he's diluting are getting a bad outcome to their story rather than a good outcome or a better improved outcome to their story, where instead of them surviving, they either die or they're left permanently maimed or something because of his intervention. 11:10 Wes: He's like the inverse of a mentor figure. Right. So often if there's a hero and an antagonist or a villain, then you might have a mentor figure in a film if you've been reading your Joseph Campbell, to help the hero mature enough to the point where he becomes capable of defeating the villain. So the third man, so to speak, or the mentor, is like a spiritual midwife. And in this case, Harry is a corruptor. Although he does. Right. He still performs that function by the end of the movie by, obviously, I think Holly is going to come away from this being less convinced of his own romanticization of the outlaw status, for instance. So he is psychologically delivered, in a sense, by this confrontation with what Harry really is. But you're making me think now. Yeah. We should try to unpack some of these various meanings of the Third Man. So at a more literal level, they've staged or they, I guess they've run over Joseph Harbin in the street. Right. Is that what's happened to them? 12:17 Erin: Yeah. 12:18 Wes: So Harry is one of the people helping carry the body. And then they put Joseph Harbin in Harry's grave. So it's that whole, I guess, three-card monte thing at work. And then it occurs to me that the outlaw. Right. So any Thirds we can think of will be applicable here. Right. So it's not just there's the law and then there's those who are subject to the law. Right. If they're obedient to the law. Or there's the haves and there's the have nots, these Thirds. Right. You could be the outlaw, but an outlaw serving vigilante justice, or you could be a black marketeer, but not someone who's fully a villain. Right. Just Sort of in a gray zone. Maybe. Maybe that's one other way to get at this idea of thirdness being in a gray area as opposed to a black and white area, but it's one that turns out to be more black. There's the third man in the sense of the Ubermensch, the one who is beyond good and evil. And we get a little bit of that flavor in Harry's final speech in his amoral, you know, his argument for amorality. And then he even ends it by saying, In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. So. That we need a little corruption and conflict and all that to produce an environment that will help foster great art. And perhaps Holly's novels are more like the cuckoo clock in the end, but than they are like Michelangelo, but. Yeah, so that kind of speech makes me think of the. Right. So Harry's probably self conception as being beyond all these moral concerns of ordinary mortals. That's another type of thirdness in the sense of being not among the evil, not among the good, but just above all that. 14:24 Erin: Yeah, above it. Above it is certainly right. I like that. The idea that I had where I was thinking of this third man phenomenon, which on Wikipedia is called the third man factor or the third person syndrome. And that phrase, third person syndrome also made me think of the third person, the grammatical third person. One of the moments that stood out to me on this watch was in that early bar scene when Calloway and Holly are talking to each other. Holly says, I guess no one knew him like he did, like I did. So he drunkenly refers to himself in the third person. Though, of course you could also read that as nobody knows Harry like Harry knows Harry. But there's a. You know, there's this idea of the narrative and what the story is, who narrating the story, you know, Holly seems to believe throughout the film that he knows that he's sort of the real narrator in a way that he's like going to uncover what's really going on and tell the real story. The true narration that Calloway somehow has closed off, doesn't want access to, isn't curious enough about. And then when we're at the top of the Ferris wheel and Harry is looking down, talking about the little dots, you know, one thinks of playing God, of course, but also of this third person Narration, looking down at people. So rather than being in, like, an I thou relationship with someone, you know, you're looking at people in the third person as your pawns or your victims or your. I mean, actually, Harry doesn't like the word victim, as he says. Right. But. Because it sort of impugns him, but looking down on people, manipulating them. So I was also thinking about the third person to add that to your list. And then I also looked up, as I think I mentioned before, I looked up how penicillin was diluted. This is really interesting because I thought. I thought at this point, of course, you know, penicillin would be administered in a syringe. Right. So I was thinking about water, the sewers, you know, okay. Like watery. How would they water down penicillin? And what I found was that penicillin was actually a powder, and it would be mixed with saline just before injection, but that it would exist in a powdered form. And so unless he was getting to each syringe, you know, like right before it was put into somebody's arm and diluting it individually, he would have to be diluting the powder. And how it was diluted was with chalk. Harry Lime. Right. So chalk is also the third substance, if you will. There's the penicillin, the saline, and then the chalk would be the third substance, which would be diluting the penicillin. And so I was thinking about that in terms of lime. I mean, I also even noticed I'm a big. I'm really into trees. And, you know, I even noticed that the path, the graveyard path that Anna walks along a couple of times is lined by linden trees, lime trees. So in addition to this kind of, you know, the weirdness of his name being a fruit or a tree or, you know, a stone or a mineral where there's this kind of flexibility. I also just thought that lime could itself be the third substance, the third thing inside the syringe. 17:31 Wes: I think lime in certain situations can serve as a kind of catalyst. Right. And the point of the catalyst is to get two other things together in a chemical bond. 17:41 Erin: Ah, ha ha. 17:42 Wes: Which I don't think is literally what's going on with the penicillin, but in a way you could think in a looser sense, like the chalk is like a catalyst that helps the penicillin powder get together with the saline. Is that what you said it was? 17:53 Erin: Yes. 17:54 Wes: And as we said, the mentor figure would be a kind of spiritual catalyst. In this case, I think of adulteration or I think of the kind of Catalyst that maybe is corrosive or something like that. So instead of serving to create the right bonds, whether it's between materials or people or whatever, or institutions or the parts of institutions, to fix things in the sense of helping things function. Right. So to speak, helping the mechanisms of government or social relations work, he fixes things in the sense of. He. I don't know. It's not necessarily that he's going to prevent those ordinary operations or chemical reactions from occurring. It could be that, I suppose. But whatever it is, he gets into the crevices of things. He gets into the. The gears, so to speak, into the machinery as a way to exploit what's going on, to exploit these interactions and reactions. So it's almost like he's a catalyst for himself. And of course, he does adulterate. I mean, in the end, what he's doing with the. He's the wrong sort of third thing for the penicillin, because what are they doing? Are they just over diluting it? 19:12 Erin: Yes. 19:13 Wes: Yeah. His own desire or greed or whatever, his own desire to exploit robs the combination of what it needs to become fully what it is to become effective, to help with sickness. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is what he's taking is, in a way, the spirit or the operating mechanisms or the interactions and reactions, the kind of the functioning itself. He feeds off of that well. 19:40 Erin: And I like this idea that he's the sort of the bad catalyst. You know, he's also narratively this catalyst as well. Right. He's bringing together the two sides of the black market transaction. And this makes me think about what we were talking about at the beginning of Part one with why is. Why is Holly here at this time? In the end, Harry loses precisely because for whatever reason at this moment, he brings Holly in to the equation. You know, he's the catalyst for Holly and his scheme, or Holly and the police or whatever, you know, to get together ultimately and cause his own destruction. Right. So there's like a bad narrator quality where somehow getting Holly involved with this and being the catalyst for bringing Holly in, which he thinks is going to work in his favor, is the thing that actually causes the end of his story. It shuts down the narrative for him. It shuts down his racket. 20:40 Wes: Jung has this idea of a shadow ego. Have you heard of this? 20:43 Erin: Oh, yeah. 20:46 Wes: Okay. Well, then I better get it right. You have to correct me. There's a lot more pressure if you know. So I think. Tell me if this works. One might see Holly as a sort of disavowed, weaker version of Harry. Right. So when someone like Harry who's become cynical and a bit grandiose and amoral and all these things intrapsychically, they've tamped down the vulnerable dependent part of themselves. Right. They've got to be third, they've got to be beyond the dyad of the, you know, the one who depends and the one that's dependent on. They're above that, they're self sufficient and so they disavow. So it could be an effeminate side, it could be a weak side, it could be the sucker. And that's the part of oneself that can come back to bite you. It's not always a very stable place to be in the kind of state that Harry is in. If it doesn't happen, literally, if your sidekick friend doesn't come in and screw everything up for you, it can happen intra psychically where what you've tried to repress or disavow or push to the side comes back and bites you. 22:01 Erin: I like that a lot. You're saying Holly is the shadow of Harry, not the other way around. Or could it work both ways? 22:09 Wes: Well, it could go both ways. So it's whatever. The shadow self will be a repressed unconscious part of the personality that someone rejects that they're and possibly are ashamed of. Right. So you would think normally of someone who wants to think of themselves as macho and in control and they might be trying not to acknowledge a more dependent or feminine or whatever part of themselves that they're ashamed of. They don't want to be weak, they're strong. So you could look at this. It kind of reverses the perspective and almost like puts Harry in the position of the protagonist even though he's not part of the film for until the end. Right. So it's a bit of a reversal to think in this way. But yeah, Harry becomes the kind of tragic protagonist who is defeated by this part of himself that he thought he had gotten rid of, but that comes back to get him. And why does it come back to get him? Because, well, he thought he was going to integrate it into the racket. Right. He thought he was going to be able to make use of Holly to perpetuate the racket in some way, apparently, but instead Holly turns out to not just be a weak and repressible because there's a bit of a moral fiber there that hasn't been extinguished. 23:26 Erin: Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing this up because I was thinking a lot about Whether or not Harry is really the protagonist. And there's part of me that wants to say, I almost want to read him as not even being real or being symbolic. Right. One could argue that he's a symbol of war itself or the effects of war. I'm sure there are a bunch of other symbols that we could attach to him, but it seems like he's not quite corruption itself. Or maybe he is. Maybe he is for Holly. He represents something that might have become corrupted in Holly but hasn't for some reason. 24:02 Wes: Yeah, I think what I was saying before. So you can look at it from the perspective of Holly's psyche. Right. And see Harry as an ideal. Something that starts out as an ideal but doesn't turn out to be so great in reality. So Harry is the outlaw in one of Holly's novels, but turns out to be just a real villain. Holly's fantasy of being the outlaw but the noble outlaw turns out to be immature. 24:28 Erin: Right. 24:29 Wes: And he has to find that out. 24:31 Erin: And maybe I was thinking about this in terms of maybe Harry being something like war itself. That this idea of resistance, of authority which Holly is really attracting. 24:40 Wes: And little boys fantasize about war and suggest war. 24:43 Erin: Exactly. And it always turns out to actually be something really ugly and not at all about nobility and everything about just exploitation. And I suppose I also was thinking about Harry as war because of his psychological impact on Anna. And maybe we could transition to talking about her. Unless there's something. 25:02 Wes: Yeah, let's do that. 25:03 Erin: More that we want to say about Harry. But that ultimately seems to be what Anna is about or what her hang up is and why we all know, I think that she can't and won't move on from this relationship. And you know, Harry was good to her. She believes that he sacrificed for her or helped her out in some way. She's never going to give that up and she's never going to believe that he's anything other than noble. And so her relationship with him seems to be one which is just. She's never going to be able to get over it. She's never going to be able to have a normal life. So the effect that this relationship has on her is like someone who's just been a victim of something like a war, who can just never move on from that. They carry these psychological scars and they maybe can't form normal relationships with other people after this experience. 25:53 Wes: Yeah, this makes sense. And she does seem traumatized. I mean, I have in my notes, like, what do she and Holly see in someone like Harry? Like, you know, that's why I associated them with being callow or naive. 26:07 Erin: Oh, my God. 26:08 Wes: It does seem to me they have to be either self destructive or. 26:14 Erin: Now I can't say that I see something great in him because I, you know, it's very revealing. 26:19 Wes: Well, okay. And we all, I mean, I think there's something of admiring the outlaw in all of us. Don't get me wrong, I'm not. 26:27 Erin: Yes. And there's also just like. 26:28 Wes: I can't. 26:29 Erin: There's also just my, as I think I've mentioned before, Orson Welles. Crush on Orson Welles. 26:34 Wes: Yeah, yeah, he's great. So, yeah. Aside from his charisma. Aside from his amazing charisma, which really 26:41 Erin: makes this work, actually. I mean, that goes a long way, right? 26:45 Wes: Yeah. It definitely would not work without that. And he is the strongest character in the film and the best actor in the film and all that. 26:51 Erin: Yeah. 26:52 Wes: What do people like Holly and Anna see in someone like Harry? I think there has to be an element of self destructiveness in it. And I think maybe that's what you're getting at with Anna and her trauma, I think must proceed. You get the feeling that there's a trauma that precedes her susceptibility to someone like Harry and the trauma has something to do with the war. Although I don't think we really learn anything specific details about what she's gone through. Just like we don't learn about, you know, what were Harry and Holly doing during the war? Was Holly in the war? You know, I don't think we learn about her. I don't think we'd learn about anyone's war trauma. 27:28 Erin: Right, no. 27:30 Wes: Hers included. But she seems that way. I mean, do you get the same feeling that she seems? 27:35 Erin: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when she says that Harry never grew up, that the world grew up around him and buried him. You know, she seems to be speaking from kind of strange experience there or maybe talking about herself in a way. She's just viewing him through the lens that she wants to view him through that has no relationship to reality. I mean, there's nothing about him that seems not grown up. You know, there's nothing about him that seems boyish. Holly seems boyish, Right, Exactly. 28:03 Wes: Yeah, Very true. Yep. 28:04 Erin: And so that seems to be entirely projection on her part that she would somehow. She's been stunted. 28:12 Wes: He needs me to save him. 28:14 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Even though he's saving me or you know, like she sees him in this pure way where he's purely her savior, no matter what he is proved to have done. She won't believe it. 28:25 Wes: Well, he uses his powers for good, Right. The racket is about getting her passport. And as Popescu says. Right. Popescu talks a lot about duty, the Romanian guy. And he says some contradictory things like, oh, Harry couldn't have been part of a racket. He had a great sense. That's impossible. He had a great sense of duty. And then in another place, you have to break the rules sometimes. Humanity's duty. So it's a duty to break the rules. And he's talking specifically about Harry fixing Anna's papers there. And then, of course, also says it was the duty of the porter to give evidence. Of course, as soon as he learns about what the porter's, you know, communicating, he goes and kills him right after saying that. But anyway, Right. Yeah, so much for duty. 29:09 Erin: So I think that's. All of this together is why it's like, okay, is Harry representative of the entire war? Because we have these contradictions. You know, on the one hand, duty, duty, that's the war. That's the buzzword of the war, is doing your duty for your country or whatever. But then at the same time, well, it's also your duty to break a few eggs, right? 29:29 Wes: It's your duty to go and murder people. It's not murder, but, you know, necessarily. It could be, but, yeah, it's your duty to go do something which normally it would be your duty not to do, which is kill people, but go. 29:39 Erin: That's right. Yeah. And then we have Calloway, who wants to just make sure that Harry is dead. You know, there's really no question of due process there or anything like that, though. He has all the evidence and he's willing to put on a slideshow for Holly's benefit. Finally, in the most ridiculous. Right, exactly. You know, has him look at fingerprints and all this. All this stuff. Yeah, Great. 30:04 Wes: Great. Little montage there of Holly getting disillusioned. 30:07 Erin: Right. We see him look increasingly forlorn. 30:10 Wes: Get more whiskey. 30:13 Erin: But the. Yeah. So the whole idea of an international police, or of gosh, it seems so. It's sad to say this, and it seems so. Like such a pipe dream now, but, you know, the UN becoming so popular after World War II, and everybody thinking that that was going to end all war. The very idea of an international police seems to be this. This. This idea that, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna fight the war to end war. We're gonna police the world so that war never happens. And so Harry, you know, this sort of like Vendetta against Harry in particular, when we can imagine that people are doing all kinds of horrible things. Harry can't be the only black marketeer in Vienna who's killed people. 30:52 Wes: But it's children. 30:53 Erin: But it's children. Yeah. 30:54 Wes: Specifically, if I bring you by the hospital, I think you're gonna agree he's the worst. 30:59 Erin: I don't know. It's Orson Welles. I'm with Anna. No. 31:03 Wes: All those cute little kids. Meningitis. 31:06 Erin: Sorry, 31:11 Wes: Have you seen a meningitis baby? 31:16 Erin: See, Harry doesn't kill kids. Meningitis kills kids. 31:18 Wes: It's not. That's right. 31:21 Erin: No. 31:21 Wes: But. 31:21 Erin: Yeah, war. War kills kids too. I don't know. I thought of other things that could be that he could be symbolizing or that this whole situation could be symbolizing. There seems to be Nazism or the Holocaust. Right. People not wanting to testify, people not wanting to come forward or. Or. Or put a stop to anything or to say, you know, to help. All of these ideas of collaboration. Right. It's all. 31:46 Wes: Holly tells Popescu. The porter didn't want to get involved. I think he uses the word. 31:50 Erin: Right. And it was his duty, even though 31:52 Wes: it was his duty. So the. Yeah, a lot of people don't want to get involved because they could get into big trouble just even if they're doing the right thing. 32:00 Erin: Exactly. Anyway, I want to read Harry as more of a. He seems bigger than a man. He seems like an entire force of nature or. Yeah, I mean, he literally puts himself in the position of playing God, of course, but he seems. Yeah, he seems to have this huge outsized effect on everyone around him. But I get the strong suspicion that Anna has been traumatized by something. That she had a terrible time during the war and that she's never going to get over it. And in a way, maybe she. It's just occurring to me now. I don't know if I even believe in this, but she too, could be a sort of larger force. Like she's all of post war Europe, hopelessly in love with Harry and unable to move on from him. Destroyed by whatever has happened and sort of unable to come back from it. Have you been to Vienna? 32:49 Wes: No, I've only been to Salzburg. The hills are alive. 32:54 Erin: Yeah, it's a lot cleaner now. 32:57 Wes: Oh, really? 32:58 Erin: They picked up all the rubble, but. Yeah, it's. 33:03 Wes: Well, that's the romance of it. 33:05 Erin: I know. Well, it's. 33:06 Wes: If I can't scramble around the rubble, I'll be. People are chasing me. Or into the sewer system, for that matter. Hey, we haven't talked about that, but yeah, that sewer system might be cleaner than our aqueducts. Do we have aqueducts? Nope. 33:22 Erin: Nope. 33:23 Wes: It's pretty. Looks like a little water park, but black and white, so who knows? 33:27 Erin: Well, and Paine says at one point that it smells sweet. I'm assuming he's being ironic, being sarcastic. Right. But it really is like they're just running around in regular water. 33:39 Wes: You don't get a sense of the filth, really. But yeah, those Germans are very clean Germanics. Are we allowed to call the Austrians Germans? They were to Hitler. They were Germans. 33:51 Erin: That's right. Well, doesn't Popescu call Kurtz an Anglo Saxon too? So those Anglo Saxons, they have funny ideas or so. I don't know. 34:02 Wes: But. Sorry, you were making a point about the. Oh, it's cleaner now. 34:07 Erin: Yeah, it's pretty darn clean in the film too. Yeah. I don't know. I think this is one of the best places on film ever. Another one that I think of, actually, which is like so much later than this and still quite destroyed by the war, is the Berlin of Wings of Desire, the Wim Wenders film, which is in the 80s and it's still has that post war malaise feel to it. Yeah. Vienna just. And I was expecting it to be a little more shadowy or. You know, I think it's significant to me somehow that the pictures I have of those statues are all cleaned up and white and shiny. You know, of course that's. That's what you do, but, you know, it's very, very different feel. And it made me feel a little eerie, loving the third man as I do, being there and finding it so clean. Wide streets and everything being white and just open. 35:03 Wes: Did you go to a Mozart opera based on a flyer that someone just handed you while you're walking down the street? 35:10 Erin: I did go. I think I did go to the Josefstadt while I was there. I broke into. I shouldn't. Probably shouldn't admit this. I broke into the cemetery where I jumped the fence of the. The cemetery where Mozart was buried because it was closed and it was my last night and I didn't know that it closed early and so we broke into the cemetery. Maybe that one. I don't remember. This was a long time ago. I was 20, so 14 years ago. And I did all kinds of things. I went to the Sacher hotel. Sacher. Sacher. I still don't know how to say that. The hotel that they put Holly up in that Austrians are not allowed to go in. S A C H E R and they have this Sacher or something torte. Which is famous. It's a famous Viennese dessert. And anyway, so you had to have that. And then there's. In the dining room, there are all the different opera stars, pictures, signed pictures on the walls of all the different opera stars that have visited there because it's right next door to the opera. So, yeah, I was in heaven. I saw all the. Everything Mozart related, you know, just. Yeah, it was filled with music. So I have no idea exactly what I did. I don't have to go back and review the photos. 36:29 Wes: Do you know the novel about Vienna right before the war, the End? Oh, the World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig? 36:36 Erin: I've not read it. 36:37 Wes: Okay. I mean, I've only read a bit of it, but it's an interesting memoir. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 because of Hitler, basically. But he wrote it, so he wrote it just before dying and he's recounting the history of Vienna from his childhood onward and then how it changed up to the point where Hitler was ruining everything. So it's very interesting. But yeah, I was just gonna say also. Yeah. In Salzburg, which I went in 1995, I think someone. You just walk down the street and people are handing you flyers for classical music and stuff. And I ended up going to see Don Giovanni. I think it was amazing. 37:18 Erin: His best one. 37:19 Wes: The culture is everywhere. 37:21 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 37:22 Wes: So it's a very. It's an interesting. It's quite a contrast between what a place like Vienna is in peacetime and then what it can be in wartime, you know. And this is similar contrast to what Germany represented culturally versus what Germany ended up doing in World War II, which is very dark. And that, of course, is the association that Harry makes between the capacity for high culture, he thinks is supposed to be connected to the capacity for darkness and amorality. So it kind of conceals it until it comes out, you know, so all that. Right. The white statue, statuary and the culture and on this inter. You know, on this point of view conceal this darker side. 38:06 Erin: Yeah. So, okay. I think. I think we just about covered everything. I mentioned that a lime is a kind of fruit and. And it's also chalk. 38:16 Wes: Yeah. Weren't you going to say something more about that? 38:18 Erin: No, I just. I went through all the limes. There are. I'm really glad I did that because otherwise, yeah, I would have been embarrassed. 38:25 Wes: Did you get the disease or is that. 38:26 Erin: Oh, that's with a Y. But that would have been a good one since the movie deals in homophones. That would have been a good one to mention. Darn. 38:33 Wes: Doesn't penicillin help with that? Or probably not. 38:38 Erin: Certainly not the kind that I've been getting from my Vietnamese supplier. 38:42 Wes: Oh no, yeah, only good. I'll show you where you get the good stuff. 38:46 Erin: Okay, good. All right. Thank you, thank you and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

The so-called “third man factor” is a phenomenon in which people in dire circumstances experience the presence of an extra person in their midst who gives comfort and aid when it’s most needed—a guardian angel, perhaps, or some figure of divine intervention. Harry Lime seems to have played just such a role in the lives of Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt. But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less-than-angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify, adulterate rather than help. And indeed, as a black market middle-man, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people’s lives for the worse—like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Wes & Erin discuss the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The so called third man factor is a phenomenon in which people in dire circumstances experience the presence of an extra person in their midst who gives comfort and aid when it's most needed. A guardian angel, perhaps, or some figure of divine intervention. Harry Lime seems to have played just such a role in the lives of Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt. But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less than angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify and adulterate rather than help. And indeed, as a black market middleman, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people's lives for the worse, like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Today we're Talking about the 1949 classic film the Third man, about friendship and betrayal and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:28 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. 1:30 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, what do you think Holly Martins was doing during the war? Was he a draft dodger? 1:43 Wes: You know, it's interesting. I never thought of that. The question never occurred to me. Do we know what Harry was doing? 1:50 Erin: Well, apparently just living in Vienna and cheating people. I mean, I think Holly says that the last time that he saw him was in September of 39. 2:00 Wes: Okay. 2:00 Erin: Sort of a significant timing there. So he's been gone for the entire. 2:04 Wes: So he was a war profiteer the entire time? 2:07 Erin: I think so. Or, you know, in training to become the world's greatest war profiteer. I don't know if that ultimately is what he is by the end, but he seems pretty. Seems to have a pretty good racket. 2:18 Wes: It's interesting because I. So as far as Holly goes, I do have trouble imagining him in the military. He does try to cultivate a kind of bad boy personality, which I don't think translates very well today. Seems a bit silly. And then there's his preoccupation with sheriffs. Right, we get that. And he's written a book about someone who's vindicating a friend who's wrongfully persecuted by a sheriff. See, these are Cowboy books that he writes. And of course, this he finds himself. So the Lone Rider of Santa Fe is a story of a man who hunted down a sheriff who was victimizing his best friend. Which of course happens to be the way the plot of the film begins. I love the reaction of Payne, who's the. I don't even know what Payne is. Is he an MP or the sidekick to Calloway? Do you know what, technically he is anyway? 3:14 Erin: I think he's a sergeant. 3:15 Wes: Okay. 3:16 Erin: Yeah. In this international police force. Sergeant. I know. As opposed to major. 3:20 Wes: Everyone's got a great name. Anyway, the Payne respond sounds anti British, sir. Very funny. So he's got a problem with authority now. Not that that rules out being in the army or something. My father would tell stories of how he would get in fist fights with his officer and. Yeah, talk about a problem with authority. Anyway, he was always fighting the powers that be when he was in the army, but yeah, there's just something. There's something about him that makes me think, no, I can't envision that. 3:50 Erin: Yeah, he has a little boy obsession with these stories of justice and, you know, standing up for the wrongfully accused. And so that would sort of suggest that his morality is a bit black and white, which is where I think he stumbles in his assessment of Harry. And yet in his relationship with Harry or Lime. I don't know what we should be calling these people, especially because I wrote throughout my notes, Holly Martin's name. I wrote as Holly rather than Martin's, even though everybody calls him Martins because Holly is such a ridiculous name, which is commented on in the film, too. 4:26 Wes: I wrote him as Holly just because I don't like the name. Martins is too generic. 4:30 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. 4:31 Wes: But then on the other hand, I wrote Harry because I could say Harry and Holly. 4:36 Erin: Yes. 4:36 Wes: And they alliterate, so. 4:38 Erin: And in fact, Anna herself makes that mistake calling Holly Harry. But there's something about Holly, too, that's suggestive of his personality. This boyish sort of frozen in time quality about him. Which is why I think that his efforts to be a tough guy or something like that are rather comical, really. He's kind of an alcoholic. Right. He's constantly getting drunk and he's broke 5:06 Wes: even though he's published all these novels. 5:09 Erin: Yeah. And they're the ones that are actually supposed to make money. Right. The pulp novels are. 5:14 Wes: Right, exactly. 5:16 Erin: The popular. 5:17 Wes: So he can't give a lecture on the modern novel and stream of consciousness and whatever. But he also isn't making money with his pulp Novels that people know about. 5:26 Erin: Yeah, right. Maybe the suggestion is that they're out of fashion and that he's out of step with his time, just as he's sort of living in this perpetual adolescence, which seems to color his view of Harry for most of the film. Maybe these stories that he's writing are, you know, about cowboys and sheriffs and all of this are. Have fallen out of favor in post war malaise and corruption. But anyway, yeah, it's a sort of a. It just. It made me wonder. On the one hand, he has this huge problem with authority, which Harry seems to have encouraged. On the other hand, he seems to see the world in these black and white moral terms, which would suggest that you, for instance, dodge the draft or that you probably think, you know, Nazis are bad. But who knows with him? He's a little ambiguous. 6:17 Wes: Yeah. This is puzzling, now that you mention it. A man of his age would be. Is he in his 30s or 40s? 6:24 Erin: I think he's in his. I think he's in the 1940s version of his 30s. 6:30 Wes: Which looks like 50s. 6:31 Erin: Which looks like 50s. But it's Joseph Cotten. He has a. You know, he's appealing. Not as appealing as Orson Welles, but that's another story. 6:43 Wes: Well, I think now it occurs to me that Graham Greene, who I love the two novels of his that I've read, Brighton Rock and End of the Affair. 6:52 Erin: End of the Affair, End of the Affair. 6:55 Wes: And he wrote a good screenplay here. And that's interesting because often that doesn't go well when a novelist tries to write a screenplay. But as William Faulkner found out. Yeah. It strikes me that maybe he's being clever with the name. So Holly's L's are sort of like R's, right? Holly and Harry. So that they perhaps are alter egos in some sense. And Harry is the real deal. Real. Not the leal. The real deal. He's got the R's. Harry is the real deal. And Holly is a hologram. I don't know. What does Martin associate to? There's the bird. And then I want to say fake, but my vocabulary is failing me. Is there another alternate meaning for the word Martin? 7:43 Erin: Small Eurasian bird. Any of various birds of the swallow family. 7:48 Wes: Yeah. 7:49 Erin: I spent more time with Lime than with Martin, which actually, I spent a lot of time with the word Lime. 7:57 Wes: Yeah, right. But, yeah, let's discuss that when we get to it. But for some reason I was associating to fake or something like that. But, yeah, he's a replica. It seems apparent from context that he knows that Harry is into rackets and the black market, but that he doesn't know the extent of it. So he seems to have this strong moral compass, I guess, when it comes to taking penicillin away from children. 8:23 Erin: That's where he draws the line. 8:24 Wes: Yeah, that's where he draws the line. 8:26 Erin: But if it was just tires or sugar, then he's like, come on, haven't we all resold tires at a premium 8:35 Wes: in the aftermath of the war? Haven't we all done the black market thing? Yeah. And it occurred to me he and Anna are quite naive. And then I thought of the name Calloway, because Calloway is not actually Callow, they are. So I think because Harry turns out to be such a bad guy in the end, and I don't know if the person that they say that they knew was better. Holly is very sentimental about Harry when he thinks he's dead. He was the best friend I ever had. And then Calloway accuses him of sounding like a dime store novel or something like that, being too sentimental. But it's clear that Harry was always. He had the ability to fix things, I think, is what. What Holly says. So he was doing this before the war. I can imagine them as teenagers doing this, that or the other. Right. Holly seems to admire that. So he admires this darker side. But on the other hand, he won't go the whole way. 9:31 Erin: In a private moment with Anna, Holly talks about their relationship as boys. And Anna asks, was he clever when he was a boy? And Holly says, I suppose so. He could fix anything. Which is just such a wonderfully ambiguous phrase because at first we think, you know, he maybe was good at fixing things that broke. Right. 9:50 Wes: Which is what I thought when I first heard it. 9:52 Erin: Yeah. Yes. And she says, what sort of things? Like, you know, cars or whatever. Right. Oh, little things. How to put your temperature up before an exam. The best cribs. How to avoid this and that. And then Anna says, he fixed my papers for me. He heard that the Russians were repatriating people like me who came from Czechoslovakia. He knew the right person straight away for forging stamps. And then Holly says, when he was 14, he taught me the three card trick. That's growing up fast. And Anna says, he never grew up. The world grew up around him, that's all, and buried him. You know, it occurs to me that the only person whose opinion of Harry really changes over the course of the film is Holly. I mean, Calloway is wrong about Harry being dead, but other than that, he's right about who Harry is. Anna is wrong, but her opinion of him does not change. Regardless of evidence. Holly's is the only one, you know, and all the other guys around Harry seem to know who he is. And, you know, they all have differing stories about him, but their opinions about him don't change either. And yet what Holly's telling us here about him is remarkably consistent with the guy he grew up to be. You know, so somehow doing these things when you're a kid, putting your temperature up before an exam so, you know, getting out of an exam, the best cribs and how to avoid things, that's what made me think of this idea of draft dodging. All of these things have to do with getting out of tests or getting out of the position that an authority figure might put you in if they had so much access to each other. You know, I'm kind of imagining them in like a boarding school, boys, boarding school kind of environment that is not in the script. But it's just, you know, there seems to be so much intimacy between them in this kind of boys school way. And Graham Greene, as a, you know, as an Englishman probably would have that. 11:36 Wes: Was he an Eton guy? 11:38 Erin: I'm not sure, but he must have been. Right. So this whole idea of, you know, your whole life being organized around getting out of things or somehow trying to evade authority or stick it to authority, and then by having taught him the three card trick, I was thinking about that with the three card. I usually refer to it as the three card Monte. You usually need a shill for that. So he taught Hollywood maybe what these, what the three card trick was about. In other words, that he was being scammed by somebody, or maybe he taught him how to perform it with him. In other words, that Holly was kind of an accomplice, that maybe Harry was pulling the scam on other boys in the school and Holly was the shill to help him pull it off. But somehow it seems that all of this is in good fun if you do it when you're a kid. And then there are acceptable ways that you could scam people as an adult with things like sugar and tires. But Holly can't extend himself to see that Harry might get involved deeper and deeper with more insidious black market items, even though he seems to have been a con artist from the moment Holly met him. So it's odd that his opinion goes through the only transformation of the film when he kind of knew he had this guy's number all along. But in one instance, he sees him as a hero for doing these things. And in another, he's a villain. 13:05 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting because now you have me looking up Three Card Monte. So it's a confidence game in which the victims or marks are tricked into betting a sum of money on the assumption that they can find the money card. Okay, well, it's like a shell game 13:19 Erin: where you're moving the. 13:20 Wes: It's a shell game. Okay. There's a connection here between the third man and the three card. 13:25 Erin: Exactly. 13:28 Wes: Which I did not make. 13:29 Erin: Well, you need three people to pull it off as well. Right. You need the Conner, the shill. And the person being conned is the person being conned, Joseph Cotten. Because if Harry taught him how to recognize this trick, in other words, Harry gave him the blueprint for who Harry became. And still Holly's somehow getting conned in its full form. 13:48 Wes: 3 card Monte is an example of a classic short con in which a shill pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer while in fact doing the reverse. So they're cheating the mark. Holly is, in a sense, in the position of the mark. Right, because he gets. He thinks he's coming over to be part of a racket. Right. To be part of a con, essentially. But he's the one who gets conned because. Yeah. What's the purpose of doing that to Holly? Why do they need to trick Holly as part of this? They need Harry to seem dead. 14:19 Erin: But, yeah, I was wondering that myself. I think why all of this happens on the day that Holly is supposed to show up doesn't make any sense to me. Okay, why do this now? 14:31 Wes: That doesn't make any sense to me. And also. Right. He's about to leave when Kurtz, Baron Kurtz, basically rings him up and says, meet me at the Mozart Cafe, and then creates all this suspicion in him. So what's the point of that? I mean, he brings a book as if he's a fan. Maybe he's just a fan who wanted to meet Holly. The book, I think, had been given to him by Harry. So I don't know how much of a real fan he is and how much of a pretext that is, but it's because of Kurtz that Holly ends up staying. So it's almost like the way all this unfolds, they really ensure that Holly is going to keep asking questions and that they're going to get found out. 15:08 Erin: Well, it's as though the. The purpose of all of this is Holly's moral education or advancement, that he's going to finally grow up it's clear that Harry doesn't trust him enough. You know, he might have gone to har. To Holly from the beginning and said, listen, I had to fake my own death because they're after me and given him some story about how he was just involved in sugar and tires or whatever and not tell him the full truth, get Holly on his side and have Holly still do the job for him and then leave. Instead of. He allows Holly to be drawn into this whole thing, giving time for Holly to learn the truth about him from Calloway, and then only appears when it's kind of too late. Maybe it's best not to look at the apparatus of that because I think there's suspension of disbelief involved. That has to. Unless we're missing some really big and important part of the way that the story is meant to function, that is Harry trying to manipulate Holly in some particular way. If that isn't the case, then maybe it's just this suspension of disbelief thing that all of this is happening when Holly just happens to be there to find it out. 16:11 Wes: Yeah. I can buy it being a coincidence, actually, but. So it is interesting. Kurtz says it's wonderful how you keep the tension in the novels, which, of course, is what's happening in that moment. Right. The tension is, he could have left and that would be the end of the story. But the tension is being maintained by. By what Kurtz is doing and then by what Holly will do. But I guess just while we're mentioning things that are confusing in looking over. So I just. Like, after I watched the movie, I looked over the screenplay or the script. Someone created, like, a shooting script that seems taken from the movie. I don't know if people are using AI now to basically take films, because if you try to read the original screenplay, I don't know if you've tried this in one of our episodes. It's. It doesn't work because so much changes during the shooting. Right. And so I'm often using these transcripts, just finding a transcript online, but that's usually unattributed, but they seem to be getting fancier. And that's describing the shots, everything shot for shot and so on. So just looking at that and going over all my notes again, I thought, oh, yeah, I don't really know. Why did Harry betray Anna to the Russians? Because that comes out in the Ferris wheel scene. I don't know if you remember that, because I didn't really fully understand that until looking at the script. And I was confused by it. And then I asked ChatGPT. I just said, why does Harry betray Anna to the Russians? And ChatGPT tried to claim that Harry doesn't betray Anna to the Russians. It's the opposite, blah, blah, blah. He helped her with her papers. And I said, and it gives very long rationale. This is what I love about AI. It's just like the ultimate rationalizer. Once it's on to some point, it can just produce a wealth of evidence. And then I just said, well, in the Ferris wheel scene, Harry says he's only safe in the Russian zone. And Holly says, oh, so that's how they found out about Anna. 18:16 Erin: He traded information for his security, which 18:20 Wes: should have been obvious to me, but anyway. And then. ChatGPT, yeah, you've caught the key line that gives the game away, blah, blah, blah. 18:31 Erin: I love it when I get complimented by AI yeah. 18:34 Wes: And then later on it says, so my earlier answer was too soft. It kind of admits that it was wrong. So that should have been pretty clear and obvious to me. But it was just another thing I was confused by. And I'm just saying that because there are. It is quite intricate and the pacing is really fast with the Ferris wheel scene, the speed of that dialogue and the background noise and stuff, I really had to pause and take notes. And even then I just went back to this transcript screenplay thing and just analyzed everything that was in the speech. And it's just a lot that happens very quickly. So it's an intricate plot and there are some confusing aspects. I don't think it's really interferes with my suspension of disbelief at any point, but there's an intricacy to it. 19:20 Erin: This is one of my favorite movies, and this is the first time watching it that I noticed that the voiceover at the beginning was not Joseph Cotton's voice or Calloway's voice. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, that's Carol Reed. And there's a possibility that I could have seen an American version of it with a Joseph Cotten vo. But instead, I know I've seen this version before, so. But the memory is hard. It's really hard to keep track of everything too, because the circumstances of the central mystery, you know, the car accident scene, involve so many people. You know, it's the third man, but it's really like the fifth man, plus the porter is a sixth man, plus Holly is a seventh man, you know, because there's also the doctor who was walking by the fact that his own chauffeur hit him. The porter having seen it, the. It's an incredibly complex. Plus, the one who was actually killed. Right. The dead body in Harry Lime's grave, who turns out to be Joseph Harbin, one of many Josephs mentioned in the film, I think, including Joseph Harbin. There are three Josephs as well. This is sort of maybe a little bit of a stretch, but Anna is an actress at the Josefstadt Theater, which is in the Josefstadt district, I believe, or neighborhood or something like that, which is named after Emperor Joseph I. And then Joseph Harbin's body is pulled behind the Joseph statue, which I've actually been to all the locations where all of this takes place. So, you know, the entrance to what supposedly Harry's building is right there. It's actually a palace. 20:50 Wes: Did you take a picture of yourself stepping out in front of a car? 20:53 Erin: I did not, but I did take a picture of the doorway. Those beautiful statues of the four women, you know, the two on either side flanking the doorway, are now white. So I don't know if they were just covered in soot or something like that because they look almost like painted black or they look gray or made out of something that isn't white stone. But anyway, Joseph Harbin is pulled behind the Emperor Joseph's statue, which is a statue of Joseph ii, another emperor, the one from Amadeus, who says, too many notes. You know, the Mozart and Salieri emperor equestrian, huge equestrian statue that Joseph Harbin has pulled behind. So there are sort of like three. It's like Joseph I, Joseph ii, and then Harbin is Joseph iii. So he's also kind of the third man. Anyway, I thought a lot about duplication in this film, and I have plenty more to say about that. But I'll stop there for now. But it's very confusing to keep everything straight. And, yeah, each one of the witnesses or the people who participated, Kurtz, Popescu, the Romanian doctor. Winkel, Winkel, Winkel. And then we never meet the chauffeur. But those three, their interviews, they all also give, like, differing pieces of information, different glosses on Harry's character. Also, like Dr. Winkel has Baron Kurtz's dog, or it's actually Dr. Vinkel's dog, not Baron Kurtz's. So I remember as a kid not really understanding fully what was going on there or what had happened. 22:24 Wes: Ultimately, yeah, I had the same confusion as you about the commentator. I had the impression that it was Holly. And then I went back and looked at the. Just looking at the script, and there's a moment where the narrator says, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, An American came all the way here to visit his friend. To visit a friend of his. Martins was broke, so a friend of his. Harry Lime. Martins was broke, and Lime offered him some sort. I don't know, some sort of job. And it's a very casual, kind of jaunty, you know, ironic and funny tone. The whole beginning is kind of. There's a fair bit of sarcasm in the way the commentator starts things. So it does say we. So we'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that. And then there's a shot, as the commentator is saying this, of a body floating in the water. A situation like that doesn't tempt amateurs. You know, they can't stay the course like a professional. So it does sound like the commentator is in on things. Yet another. 23:28 Erin: He's the 14th man in the operation. 23:33 Wes: The film isn't as comedic as the introductory tone makes it. You know, the tone that's set in the beginning isn't held. I mean, there are. I guess there's some funny things that happen, although maybe not. 23:46 Erin: Oh, I think so. I think there's a lot of silly. There's a lot of strange silliness, especially with Crabbin. 23:52 Wes: Yeah. There's the lecture, Paine punches him in the face at one point, but then is quick, very polite after that, and helps him up. Let me help you up, sir. 24:01 Erin: Right, right. The drunkenness almost immediately, Holly gets drunk in that scene. That really kind of sets the tone, too. So there's a. And the music. The Roger Ebert review of this film, which I revisited yesterday. It's in his Greatest Films collection of essays. He opens the review by saying something like, has there ever been a better soundtrack or a soundtrack better suited to its film? And he describes it as something like jaunty, but without joy. 24:32 Wes: Interesting. 24:33 Erin: Which I think is a really good way to put it, you know, so there's a. The soundtrack provides a kind of lightness. 24:37 Wes: So it's sort of a Django Reinhardt style guitar. Is that the. 24:42 Erin: It's a zither. 24:43 Wes: Oh, okay. 24:43 Erin: Yeah. And an actual Viennese zither player. Famous zither player picked up off the street by Carol Reed, ended up composing all the entire score. And so that contributes too, I think. And that also contributes to the sense of speed in the film because it's just the one instrument. And it's often. It almost has, like a silent movie type score in that it's almost reproducing Footsteps and people running, you know, chase scenes, you know, where it's almost has the effect of speeding up the action. You know, you get sort of knocked around by it. I think. 25:19 Wes: What is the atmosphere that it's trying to capture? I think there's a kind of. There's kind of a romantic. There's supposed to be something romantic about post war Vienna and the ruins and the moral. Let's call it flexibility up to a certain point. There's something romantic about that, I think. And the film was shot and actually shot in the. In the actual rubble and ruins of Vienna. So that, that. And that's the way the commentator sets things up in the. In the beginning, something about desperation and what people will do in desperation, but then some of the people aren't really that desperate. So when Holly says to Kurtz, police have the idea that he's mixed up in some sort of racket. Kurtz says, everyone in Vienna is. We all sell cigarettes and that kind of thing. I tell you, I've done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war. And then you think you're going to hear about prostitution or something. Instead I sold some tires on the black market. I wonder what my father would have said. Of course, he's much worse than that. So there's this idea that people are just trying to get by and the normal mechanisms of things have broken down and are finding a way, and it's morally flexible or compromised or whatever. But it's not so terrible. It's an environment in which the necessity to survive has overridden other considerations. But the reality is, right, it's just about being predatory. At least for Harry. It sounds like for these guys, it's more than we got to get by. It's, let's dilute the penicillin and make 80 pounds a shot or whatever it is. Even if children die, the romance of the morally flexible aftermath in a place that's been destroyed quickly gets obliterated. It turns out not to be that way. So there's something. There's a kind of disenchantment in the arc of the film. But we start out disenchanted in a way because it was a terrible war and this is the aftermath. It's destructive. But in that disenchantment there's a romance. But then we get deprived even of that romance by the end of the movie. 27:23 Erin: I think certainly the romance that we see, I mean, there's a sort of general romance to the idea of it. But then the people who are able to appreciate that or take advantage of that aspect of Vienna are those who are either not living there or who are not making money on the black market. And therefore in a financial position. It seems to not be affected by the negative elements of this place. Right. So Harry, when they get on the Ferris wheel, talks about how the kids used to love to ride the Ferris wheel. Now none of them have the money. Money to go on it. But of course he can go on and have this confrontation with Holly and feel sad. 27:58 Wes: He does. He doesn't have his. In enough of his indigestion pills. 28:02 Erin: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And Baron Kurtz is meeting. You know, is playing at the Casanova Club or meeting Holly in places called the Mozart Cafe, which get at this sort of faded neoclassical glory of the city. You know, what kind of people are going and seeing Anna at the Josefstadt Theater in that comedy of manners? Probably just the wealthy. There seems to be a play on this, too, in terms of speech. The black marketeers. Is that a term? Black marketeers, the bad guys. They have the ability to talk to Holly, or they're always kind of talking to Holly freely, even if they come up with sort of different versions of the same story. There's a kind of flexibility about them that seemed to me to be indicative of Harry being able to get away by escaping out the back of a bombed building. Like the rubble allows that escape route. 28:57 Wes: Right. 28:58 Erin: And the sewers, using the sewers. Whereas the porter can't get out. The porter is bound by virtue of his job to this building, which does seem intact and which is servicing these black market people because Harry is living there, but which seems to be servicing them specifically because it is an intact building and he is therefore murdered in the building. There's this idea of not speaking, not being able to speak. The porter's limited by not knowing very much English. And so Anna is there to translate between the porter and Holly. But also, we're told that the porter was too afraid to testify at the. I guess it was the inquest for Harry's death. So he didn't testify to say that there was a third man there. There's this sense that these ordinary people can't speak or that they're afraid to speak or that speech will betray them somehow. I think the narrator says at the beginning that all of these forces are coming in to occupy the central sector, and yet they all don't speak each other's language. There's the French, the Americans, the Russians, and the. In the English. So I guess The Americans and the English speak the same language. And the only thing they have in common is a smattering of German or something like that. So there's this idea that the good guys and the, say, ordinary people are maybe limited by their access to knowledge and their ability to communicate with each other. But these black market people, for them, the city has endless possibilities because they have a way of going out back doors or of. Or they have maybe a coalition or they have money that can get them in on the Russian side, even if they. Maybe they can't speak Russian. But you know, that like they. They seem to be the only ones who can travel with impunity, who can converse, who can make themselves understood, and therefore who can enjoy a city which for everybody else is closing in around them. I wanted to just talk about the stage money, as Holly calls it, the money that. The army money. So he has even a different currency. You know, I don't know how Holly fits in with all this. And I'm not sure if I'm characterizing Interpol the right way, because they're free too, in the city in a way that the ordinary people seem not to be free. But I think maybe it's a gradient. 31:08 Wes: The international police are limited. 31:11 Erin: They're limited. But the opening narration tells us they're hobbled by not being able to communicate with the other people. Yet they don't seem as hobbled as the regular. Like they're not going to get murdered the way that this porter is going to get murdered. You know, they have some authority which enables them to be. To exist a little bit easier. And they have their own money. Now, this money doesn't really translate to any of the places within the actual city. Right. Because at some point, Hawley's told he can't use that money I think at a bar. 31:41 Wes: Well, Anna tells him at the Casanova, they don't take army money. 31:44 Erin: They don't take army money. Yeah. And he calls it. 31:46 Wes: It's money that basically Calloway is near the beginning, stuffed into Martin's overcoat pocket. 31:53 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah. And there's this whole idea too of Interpol descending and creating these sort of false conditions within the city. So they're not even in the real. Right. They're in stage Vienna with their stage money. That doesn't actually work in the city. It's the regular people who seem to be getting shafted every which way. And the Interpol and the black market people are exempt in different ways, but both exempt from that kind of the hard lives of I'd imagine, of the people who live there. 32:23 Wes: Yeah. I think it seems like the military policing and the military law that the city is under are ineffectual. And that in part has to do with its international character. And as you pointed out, the commentator makes a lot in the beginning of the fact that you have people who can't communicate with each other, trying to cooperate as a single police force, essentially. And they also have other ulterior motives. So the Russians want to claim Anna as theirs because she's Czechoslovakian, which is a weird. You know, she's got to go to the Russian sector of the city. It's a weird preoccupation to have. Right. You got to be in my sector. So there's a way in which the varieties of nationalism are competing even as they try to be internationalist in a way and govern the city from that standpoint. So Vienna isn't, you know, Vienna has to be Viennese again fully before it's going to function, I think, is the idea. 33:20 Erin: Yeah, it does seem to be, you know, a symbol for all of Europe. And this idea, these types of silly preoccupations like we want anon in our sector are, you know, one would say, indicative of the way that Europe was carved up after World War II by FDR, Stalin and Churchill. You know, you get this part of this country, and I'll take that, and then we'll split Berlin down the middle, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, and if you're on the wrong side during the splitting process, then sucks for you. 33:52 Wes: Yeah. There were massive dislocations of millions of people from one country to another based on who ended up getting what. But, yeah, based on ethnicity. 34:03 Erin: After the war, it seems that it's the regular Joes. Right. Who are ultimately the victims of this. It's not going to be the people who are doing the carving or the people who feel that the rules don't apply to them. 34:14 Wes: Yeah. So it amplifies the ordinary. Inequalities of class get amplified in this circumstance. Right. Thought you were born. 34:21 Erin: Yes, yes. 34:22 Wes: Where. Right. You have. All the rich people can go to the theater. But also. 34:26 Erin: Yes. 34:27 Wes: Right. The beginning of the film, you know, you get all these shots of. Yeah. People looking very poor and desperate. 34:32 Erin: Right. And also just. And then these. These black market guys who maybe worked their racket, you know, and put themselves in a position to be able to go to the theater, who were not, you know, those seem to be like the social climbers in a way, who were just able to luck out during the war somehow and come into a good racket. 34:51 Wes: Yeah. In ordinary times, it would just be organized. It would just be organized crime. Right. But it almost seems a little bit more forgivable. It's not like Holly has come over to be part of the Mafia. It's just there's a more of an entrepreneurial spirit if they're just doing tires and things like that. And because social order is broken down, it's more forgivable. 35:12 Erin: Maybe this is related to Holly's idealization of Harry. So, in a way, you are. You're a successful little entrepreneur. If you could figure out how to survive under these conditions, and nobody would really fault you for it, because everybody's suffering. And so you're sort of making something of your suffering. You're pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps rather than just suffering with everybody else and following the rules or something like that. And so, you know, we see that Holly admires Harry for being able to get out of, say, tests that the other boys had to take. And he sort of admires Harry's ingenuity for being able to escape that task, that. That enforcement of authority. 35:55 Wes: Yeah. And in the. In the beginning with Calloway, you know, he wants to argue with Calloway about the seriousness of the crimes. Right. So it's just some petty racket with gasoline or something. And then Calloway accuses Lime of murder. And then that's when Holly tries to punch him. And later in the film, when Harry is finally getting wise, Holly. Sorry. When Holly is finally getting wise, Calloway will say, I told you to go away, Martins. This isn't Santa Fe. I'm not a sheriff. And you, you aren't a cowboy. You've been blundering around with the worst bunch of racketeers in Vienna, your precious Harry's friends. And now you're wanted for murder, which is another confusing thing. I don't understand the role of that little boy in getting them. 36:37 Erin: Oh, yeah. He accuses Holly of having killed the porter. 36:44 Wes: Has he put up to it? 36:46 Erin: No, I think he just, you know, he's seen Holly with the porter, and he just says, I saw that guy with him. Or he would maybe something like, he was the last one with him. My German is not that good. 36:56 Wes: How's your toddler German? 36:58 Erin: A little better. 37:01 Wes: It's romanticization of little light organized crime. But once you get to the real thing, then it's much more sinister. I don't know. Am I connecting to the point that you were just making? 37:13 Erin: Definitely. It Makes me want to think again about language, about speech and about that kind of flexibility. Because I think a consistent. Or maybe it's not that consistent. Maybe that's why I can't work it out. But I do think that there is an argument being made here about language. We have Holly calling Calloway Callahan, which puts him in a different location. As Calloway points out, he says, I'm English, not Irish, you know, so Callahan would be an Irish name. You know, we have Anna confusing the names, calling Holly Harry. We have the, you know, the confusion of the wrong body in the grave. Right. Joseph Harbin for Harry. We have the confusion of the number of people at the scene of the accident. There's much made of the confusion actually, of American geography. They keep referring to Texas as the location for all of Holly's novels, including the Lone Rider of Santa Fe and Oklahoma Kid, but they keep referring to Texas. Right. Obviously, there's the. You know, we find out that there's the dilution of the penicillin going on. So there's a kind of passing something off or something else. It's not exactly a confusion, but I think it's sort of related. This adulteration or this mistaken identity or something like that sort of extends to this idea of the dilution, which I looked up. I don't want to get us off track on that because I want to stick with language for a second. But I looked up how that would be done. And the other thing I was going to say is I noticed that in that first conversation, that bar scene. First bar scene with Calloway and Holly, when he lists his two. He names two novels of his. After he says that, he writes cheap novelettes. He says the Lone Rider of Santa Fe, which comes up several times in the film. And it occurred to me that rider is also a homophone for rider. R I, D E R could be mistaken for W R I, T E, R. Right? And then death at Double X Ranch. And then he, imitating an English accent, says raunch instead of ranch, which then becomes a different word. It becomes actually, in American English, it becomes R A, U, N, C, H. Like raunchy. I'm not sure what to say about these things, but. But maybe we can make something of them in Part two. These confusions, these what. What are they? 39:29 Wes: The whole movie is a grift. 39:33 Erin: I want to say something a little bit better than that before we close out these linguistic blips or, you know, we also. We have. The other thing I just wanted to say about that was The Crabbin, the CRS of ghq. You know, the Alphabet soup. Cultural Re Education section, the importance of language. And yet the inability to properly hear each other or make ourselves understood or know where we are. Being able to locate things in language seems to be difficult. Being able to locate people or identify people properly seems to be difficult. All these linguistic problems seem to be at the center. 40:12 Wes: Yeah. So language is a racket, potentially, but at the very least, language is falsifying. But at the very least, we get the idea that this cultural stuff is a racket. So Crabbin. He doesn't know Martins. It's just based on Paine's testimony. He's gonna have him suddenly give a lecture on the novel. So Crabbin says, cultural Re Education section. Propaganda. Just what he's doing. Very important in a place like this. We do a little show each week. Last week we did Hamlet, and the week before we had something. And then Payne says. Striptease, sir? Yes. Hindu dances. Thank you, Sergeant. First opportunity we've had of making an American author welcome. Yeah. So we get this idea that the Cultural Re Education center is not all it's cracked up to be. Then he makes a remark about Hawley's novels being popular there, even though he's never read any, and he doesn't know that. And so you could also say writing popular novels is a kind of racket. It's not the real thing. 41:19 Erin: Right. 41:20 Wes: It doesn't match up to a more serious literary pretension or aspiration. It's just about making money with silly little stories. I don't know. Is that the way to put it? That's not a great way to put it. You know, writing for money without any concern for the craft, let's say, or the. Well, no, maybe that's not the best way to put it either. Anyway, you get what I mean? 41:45 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's stop there, and we'll keep talking about the importance of language and identity, and then we'll get to maybe a more profound look at both Harry and Anna in Part two. Thank you. 42:01 Wes: Thank you. 42:05 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community. Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of elf. We had just gotten done. Erin was talking about the mutual adaptation of Buddy and the people that he's interacting with in New York. And you had me thinking earlier about this in terms of there's a feedback loop between catalysts. So he's got to be a catalyst in a way to change people so that they in turn can be catalysts for him. What does he really need, though, since he's so happy and can eat canned syrup on syrup all day, including alcoholic syrup, what does he need? He needs. Nominally, he needs a father, although he's got a perfectly good father and papa. Yeah. But I think one of the things we had toyed with was the idea that he needed to be with human beings, as racist as it sounds. But he stick to your own kind, not from a racial standpoint, but from a standpoint of being connected to the spirit world without being entirely absorbed into the spirit world. So coming from the spirit world to be the mediator. But he's not just a Christ figure. He's got to learn to be human, essentially, and perhaps even to be an adult to some extent, God forbid. But what's going to happen with him and Jovie and they have a kid. Yikes. But at the end of it, how's that going? 1:58 Erin: Best not to think too deeply about that. 2:03 Wes: But in any case, so he's both angel and messenger and mediator, but the world is also that to him. And this is kind of catch 22. And you see it actually in relationships where people, in a sense, need to help each other, but to get the help you need from one person, you might need to help them do something first. In other words, you might need to help them become capable of helping you. Help me help you change at a deeper psychological level, so that then they can help you with your change. So he's going to reform Walter, make him less cynical, make him a better father, make him someone who's not going to try to cheat children out of their storybook endings, which is literally what he tries to do. It doesn't matter to him if they don't find out what happens to the. What. What are the characters? 2:52 Erin: A penguin or a penguin and a puppy. 2:55 Wes: Penguin and a puppy. And to help Michael have a father and to help Jovie be someone who can sing in public. And does he help anyone else? I mean, he's helping all the world in the sense. Right. By restoring Christmas spirit. Right, but thinking in terms of specific interactions. But these other figures that he's transforming, they're part of what he needs, so he's transforming them so they can also be something for him. 3:23 Erin: I don't know if I want to go in this direction, because it seems a little like we might be taking this too seriously. But it makes one think of theological types of questions, like, does God need us to worship him? There seems to be this same feedback loop that you're describing in the whole idea of the Incarnation, or the idea that Christ needs to come down and be human and be part of us, and that there's this. This mediation that happens between us and God. And then we're also supposed to be the catalysts, not for. Not for helping Jesus do something, but, you know, for. For others that has to have a kind of ripple effect. But I'm cringing as I say this because I don't. I don't necessarily want to make this. I don't want to go down this path and talk about the theology of Elf. There is more I wanted to say about the whole faith and works thing having to do with Walter. But should we drill down a little bit more into Walter? Because the thing that I want to know is why? I mean, he's a children's book author. Because in the end, Buddy has to be a children's book author. 4:19 Wes: And then thematically, it's very. You know, it's nice. It's neat, that thematically. Right. He's trying to kill off storybook endings. 4:27 Erin: Right. Right. He's a children's book publisher, I should say. 4:29 Wes: Or. 4:29 Erin: Right. I don't know what he is. 4:31 Wes: Right. So he's not just cynical and depleted and sad, kind of. And he's playing the role initially as a sort of antagonist of trying to rob people of their happy magic child storybook endings. He's in a role where he should write. He should be interested in children getting a kick out of the books that he's publishing and want them to get joy out of that. But he doesn't even, you know, he can, for financial reasons, give them an unfinished book. So anyway, symbolically, thematically, it's very rich. But in terms of the psychology, the poetics of the film, we have to ask. Yeah, how did he become that way? Why is he that way? 5:13 Erin: It's interesting because he's in this role, it seems, as a means to an end. There's this idea that he's a workaholic, and yet he doesn't really care about the work. The work has become disenchanted for him. He's working a lot, it seems, for the money, but he's also not really paying attention. He's not doing a great job. So it's quite complex, actually, because he's leaving pages out of a book, and yet he's working all the time. So it's like, what is taking up his time at this job? Nominally, he's working on making these books for children. He's working all the time, and yet he's slipping up. He's making these mistakes. I like the way that you put it that he's robbing these storybook endings from children. But at the same time, there's a lack of consciousness about it. You know, he's not deliberately taking candy from children or something like that. 6:00 Wes: It's a lapse his characterization, I think, is nice and it's subtly done right. It's not over the top, but, you know, it needs to be because he's gonna have to be reformed in the end. Right. So he can't be too much of a villain. He seems more depleted. I don't know. I think you might have said that word first, but I think it's a good one. There's an element of cynicism, but it's not irredeemable. Perhaps part of the idea here is just getting back to this idea of work is right. It's at the point where it becomes an assembly line that people get dissatisfied. It's no longer new, it's no longer creative. He's dealing with idiot writers and then also huge egos like the Miles characters who are just in it for the fame. So you can imagine it would start it out as something he was enthusiastic about, possibly. And then he's just done too much of it. He's dealt with all the bullshit and all the characters, including the receptionist who's talking about declawing kittens. 6:54 Erin: Oh, my God. Amy Sedaris in this. 6:57 Wes: I love that. 6:59 Erin: Yeah. She's so amazing in this. I love her. Anyway, and this is. She had to have ad libbed that, right? She's probably just thinking to herself, what's the sickest thing I could say in this ad libbed phone conversation? 7:11 Wes: Yeah, that would be great if it is. Is that in the trivia? 7:14 Erin: I don't. I don't. No, I didn't read that, but I wouldn't put it. I mean, she's a comedic genius, so that's exactly the kind of thing she would do. 7:20 Wes: Let's just look at this line. Oh, I don't know, Connie. I've never. 7:23 Erin: I've never declawed kittens before. 7:25 Wes: How many? Eight. 7:27 Erin: Take them down to the camper. 7:28 Wes: I don't. I don't know if I'm gonna have time. 7:31 Erin: Yeah, bring them by the camper. 7:32 Wes: Bring them by the camp. Camper. I love that. Right? Yeah. So we deal with all these, you know, the human with all these crazy characters. And it's charming from the standpoint of the film audience, but in daily life, it gets old real quick. So we. We know, you know, we're all personally familiar with how the cynicism can set in, even if it's our dream job and even if it's. Yeah. 7:58 Erin: Well, I love the connection you make to the North Pole and the assembly line idea, because the. It's actually unclear. You know, Walter has a Boss, who I think is the head of the publishing company. So Walter, presumably, would be the head of the children's book division. Maybe. Maybe this is something they say explicitly, but I don't remember it. He's not writing the books himself. He has the, as you say, these two idiot writers. One of them is Andy Richter. These two idiot writers that are actually. That he's then passing on the responsibility of making them come up with the story. 8:32 Wes: How about some asparagus children who are ashamed of the way their pee smell so good? 8:38 Erin: That is like, one of the funniest. 8:39 Wes: And it's all there vegetable ideas. 8:40 Erin: That's so funny. 8:41 Wes: But. Yeah. Sorry. 8:43 Erin: But they then pass, you know, as we already said in part one, they then pass off the responsibility to Miles Finch to come up with the idea. Drawing the connection to the elves makes me think of. This is a perfect symbol of a depleted assembly line. So rather than passing on the object to then having more things added to it, there's a sort of passing the buck. There's a. Nothing is being created, and it's just being pushed off onto somebody else. That's the assembly line quality of this. Depleted. It's not inertia, but like, you know, something that. Something that just isn't gaining any traction as it goes along. It's just becoming more and more nothing somehow. 9:24 Wes: Yeah. No. And then the person it's pushed on to, the person who's not depleted. Right. Who's still ambitious, is functioning in that way because he's completely full of himself. Right. His narcissism is his fuel. So there is spirit there in someone like Miles. Right. Where the others are just sort of there. Right. Just got to get this done. There's a kind of spirit in Miles, but it's fueled by turbines, so to speak, instead of by the. 9:52 Erin: Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah. And it's. And it's false, too. I thought about the idea that, you know, what does being a little person mean in this context other than the opportunity to make these elf jokes that. That Buddy makes. Right. But really it's this idea, of course, that being. There's a sort of superficiality to that somehow that being small means being childlike or being close to kids or having that kind of access or having that elf like. Right. So the idea is, I think that he would be this perfect children's book author somehow, because he has that understanding or that access to the mind of a kid, and instead that's flipped on its head. He's this deeply cynical, but also ambitious and Powerful man who is successful. I mean, he does seem to have success in accessing the mind of children, but that doesn't translate into any personal warmth or he doesn't seem like someone who would ever actually connect with kids in real life. 10:52 Wes: Right. So at that point where people are formidable. Right. So he's someone who's formidable. He's like the fixer, the hitman walking in, or the prima donna. He needs a certain car and it's got to be 71 degrees and all that stuff. But he's earned it with his talent. He's earned it with his genius. That kind of deference, that kind of treatment. He can make those demands on people because apparently he's supposed to be so great, but it's gone to his head. So, again, yeah, the spirit of narcissism, that in a weird way, it's more. Much more animated. And there's a sense in which it's close to the. It's more benign version, which comes from generosity and love as opposed to self love. 11:35 Erin: Yeah. There's a contradiction, though, in what he preaches and what his actual ideas are. He's about to make his pitch when the meeting gets interrupted and he tells the writer guy's that everyone's pushing small town rural. So another farm book would just be white noise. Right. And this is another thing I wanted to say actually in relationship to the idea of New York City becoming a small community, somehow that being invested through this catalyst interaction that you're describing with Buddy, where the city is changing too, in response to him. Right. Like there's this moment of the shrunken community where the city becomes a little bit more like a small town and then becomes reanimated or re. You know, destroyed. Cynicized for a moment and animated with this positive, aspirational spirit, which then of course, Buddy is able to write. He writes a book that is not about small town rural. It's about the re. Enchantment of the city itself. Right. He describes himself coming through the Lincoln Tunnel as part of his journey and being in the city. So he actually ends up fulfilling Miles's directive to stay away from small town rural. But Miles's best idea is about a peach. And what's more vulnerable than a peach? Because he also says no tomatoes. They're too vulnerable. Kids are already vulnerable. So he has these dictums that he's. That he's, you know, so one wonders what he was about to pitch in that meeting. If he was just going to throw out all these. No, small town rural, no Farm books. No vulnerable fruits. And then come out with a book about a peach on a farm. Maybe that's what he was going to do. But we don't know. We only know that. 13:13 Wes: And I think the only picture we see from that book is of a chicken. Right. So he's full of interesting. Right? Farm. 13:19 Erin: Yeah, exactly. So there's a. There's. There's something weird going on there too that he's, you know. What is his role anyway? His role is to sell an idea. Maybe that's separate from his own children's book writing career. And so he's going to deliberately lead them astray when he actually thinks small town rural is the way to go and vulnerable peach is the way to go and that he would have pitched them something else about a brobot or something. Anyway, I don't know. The point being that I think he's an extension of the city in this way that seems very much about being narcissistic, projecting these huge ambitions, but also marrying that with an incredible amount of cynicism, which involves lying or somehow being very superficial. 14:01 Wes: Yeah. Buddy recognizes him to be an elf, which is supposed to be funny. And it is. And he's not. Right. He's not trying to make a joke about it or to be insulting, even 14:10 Erin: though everything he says sounds like an insult if you just look at the words. Right. I didn't know there were elves here. Does Santa know you left the workshop? Like, they're all amazing. That dual quality is great. 14:23 Wes: And in a way, he is kind of a dark elf. That's his role in the film. Right. He's also industrious. He's also making things for kids. 14:32 Erin: I like that. 14:33 Wes: But he doesn't have the same humility. And it contrasts in a very comic way with his physical stature. But more importantly, again, just he's. He seems to be doing it out of narcissism more than love. Which is not to say that love isn't part of it. And this is always a problem. Right. We're all. If we do. Any of us who do creative work want recognition for it. But then the need for recognition can overcome the actual love of the creative work itself. So it's more about their proportion. And we know, but. Right. So someone like Walter could start out loving what he does and then just get depleted. And someone like Miles can start out more idealistically and then be too successful and get pulled into this position of self importance. So both of those are different dangers. Losing interest and just becoming a bit depressed and then having one's interest being co opted by an interest in power, let's put it that way. Recognition in power. 15:35 Erin: Yeah. That makes me think, of course, of the Central Park Rangers too. Just to give a little nod to them. Right. Because if they're supposed to be Ringwraiths, aren't Ringwraiths elves who were. Who were corrupted. Right. And they have their own. 15:51 Wes: Given one of the rings. 15:52 Erin: Right, Right. And they have their own work ethic, shall we say? They're overly speaking of power. They seem to be on a power trip and they're. Crowd control tactics at the Simon and Garfunkel concert. Led to. 16:10 Wes: Yeah. Figures like this, you know, like the Ringwraiths. Those types of figures are. Yeah. Are representatives of the dangers of power. The psychological effects of power, how it turns. You know, they're like underneath their cloaks, right. They're kind of deathlike and skeletal. So the real self gets killed off by an interest in the real self, which includes one's own vulnerability, gets killed off by the false self that is interested only in power. So the psychological effect, ironically, is it's a certain kind of depletion. 16:47 Erin: They too have a connection to work or a certain kind of overexertion in relation to performing their job. So that's obviously inherently related to power. 17:00 Wes: Motivator like love. Maybe that's the way to look at it. These dual motivators, power and love. 17:05 Erin: I think we've landed on a powerful argument for Buddy needing to adapt to New York. New York adapts to him. But I was wondering through part of the film if the lesson is that the elves have it right and their relationship to work is actually a healthy one, relatively speaking. And that the movie is making an argument about good work and good exertion and good industriousness versus bad industriousness. I think ultimately you're right that the assembly line quality is of the elves. They're suited to this. But humans are not. And I think it's important that in the end Walter gives up his job and ends up going into work for himself. And that Buddy's verve and enthusiasm for work is channeled in a creative direction rather than in the direction of production for production's sake. But there is a positive work message here, you know, that that needs to be channeled. But ultimately the movie is about finding and doing good work and work that you love and work that actually excites you. It's about that balance as well. But it really is this positive work message which leads me back to the direction that I Wanted to go in at the beginning about faith in works. It seems like that that's really important. It's really important for Walter to leave his job to make a statement about his, say, his faith in his family. But it's also really important that he get a new job where that energy can be channeled appropriately. And it's really important too that even though he believes in Santa at the end and he has been converted, that he actually sings the Christmas song. He can't just mouth it. He has to actually do the work. He has to actually show up. It's not enough to just believe. It's not enough to just walk away from the job. You've got to have that desire to work and that exertion and have it properly channeled. And you have to, you have to work, you have to do something. 18:57 Wes: Well, it connects them to the community. 18:59 Erin: That too. That too. Right. 19:01 Wes: Singing together with the crowd. 19:03 Erin: And that's part of, you know, you have to go, you have to show up. That's. This is the argument for actually going to church rather than among those who actually go to church. That is the argument that you can't just be alone in your belief. Obviously some, some people don't believe that. Some people believe that you could be just a non practicing Christian and not have to be involved in a church community. But that is the argument. 19:25 Wes: I mean, we're talking about here with work and faith. We're talking about good works. As in acts of altruism. 19:31 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And sort of to practice this idea of practice. Yeah. 19:37 Wes: Right. Okay. 19:38 Erin: So as in, as in practicing St. 19:40 Wes: Augustine, going through the motions, doing the rituals as a precursor to faith rather than. Or as a way of keeping the faith. 19:49 Erin: Right. Getting the body involved somehow in the stakes is not enough to have nice feelings. You have to actually do things to sort of support that. Whether the body goes and then the heart and mind follow or vice versa, there has to be some sort of like physical stake or backup. 20:05 Wes: Yeah. And part of what you're doing is you're representing it for others. So. Right. Otherwise faith is just abstract and invisible. And so how do we know what it is? We see other people performing these rituals, but the rituals are also symbols. So we get to see faith in the world. So that's part of my point about him singing and that being. Connecting him to the community and it also being an act of altruism. But you facilitate other people's faith by engaging in singing. 20:38 Erin: Yeah. And you're sort of backing up your words with your actions in a Way that we're describing that's. That's missing in certain elements of New York in Miles saying one thing and having it in his little bible of. His little bible of story ideas, something different, or. Or, you know, saying that something is the world's greatest cup of coffee, but not being able to back it up with the world's greatest cup of coffee or whatever. Right. That kind of disconnect or that disjuncture between what one says and what one does seems to be. It's important that that be in alignment in this film. That that re. Enchantment somehow is about the body and the spirit in agreement. 21:18 Wes: Yeah, I like that. And I like this word re. Enchantment, because I'm interested. Where are we supposed to end up? Which is part of why I asked the question about believing in Christmas as a kid. Right? Because we're not gonna end up with a belief in Christmas, and we're not gonna end up. Even if we've been graced by Buddy's angelic innocence presence. We. We are not ourselves going to become holy fools. We ourselves are not going to just simply revert into being children again. We can't become that. So we have to ask ourselves the question of what we're trying to do for ourselves and for children when we use these rituals like the Christmas. The Christmas ritual. I think in a way, we want the best of both worlds, right? And this goes back to the city and the village, the points you're making. You don't. You don't want to go full small town rural because there are too many drawbacks to that. Vulnerability is part of it. Right. We're less vulnerable in this cynical urban world. In a sense, we're more defended. I think, as you put it, there's more vulnerability, there's more community, but there's a lot of drawbacks to small towns or to rural environments. You ever read Winesburg, Ohio? 22:27 Erin: Yeah. 22:28 Wes: Yeah. It's all about that. So we can idealize that environment, but we do want a lot of the things that come with the city. The ambition and aspiration as it's represented by the Empire State Building, even a certain kind of anonymity. Very practical things like job opportunities, things like that. There's so much to be said for the city and so much to be said for the more rural or the more small town or more village environment. And I think we would ultimately, we would like to fuse them. And likewise, we would love to be able to fuse some of that innocence or Christmas spirit or just more generally spirit that Buddy Brings with, you know, with being an adult, right? We don't want to just become a child again. We don't want to give up our adultness. We don't really want to do that. But. But we still want something of the childlike innocence. So then the question is, how do you make those two things work together? And I think, just going back to the theme that you've been concentrating on, creative work is really one of the ways to do that. We can feel innocent and childlike in the sense of being very playful when we're doing creative work. If we're doing it in the spirit of play and love and have not become ring wraiths, right? Have not just been. Not become miles, not been consumed by the power of it. If we're good at it, we could be wearing the ring, essentially. We could be the greatest writer in the world. And that is the ring in Tolkien's sense. And if we are wearing the ring, then beware, because the temptations of the power of being good at the work rob us of what can be so joyful about it. 24:11 Erin: That's great. I think, in the other direction as well, and thinking about the faith component and this idea of faith in. Or belief in Santa, you know, thinking about these religious conversion themes, you know, these are movies for kids. They're movies in which often the person who has to come to believe is an adult. The child already believes. Maybe that's what the Santa thing is about for kids psychologically. Maybe this is about actually practicing faith. We have to act as though we believe the things we believe in, but we also have to believe what we act. Right? And that seems to be part of the idea of this re. Enchantment of work. You know, faith without works is dead. But also work without faith is. You know, it works in both directions. And so Walter, for instance, is reconnected to the faith element of his work. He makes these critical mistakes which mean that his works are empty without faith. So there's something bidirectional in the film's take on the importance not just of belief, but belief connected to work. So, in other words, meaningful work, as I think you're saying, which leads us, of course, back to creativity. So I'm sort of rephrasing a lot of what you're saying, but I think that is maybe connected to this idea of belief in Santa. I don't know if this is psychologically true at all. I don't know. But helping kids sort of stay connected to childhood seems like the actual motivation for encouraging them to believe in Santa. To keep them young, to keep them out of the adult world in a way by having them believe in something which is, quote unquote, magical. But you could also read that as encouraging them or having them practice a belief in something which they can't see to help them, I don't know, believe in some sort of larger principles. It doesn't have to be religious necessarily. 26:03 Wes: And I think. 26:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 26:05 Wes: To help ourselves believe in them too. Right. So we live vicariously through. Through children. And so, yeah, this is like having faith enacted in ritual so that we can reap the rewards of making it more concrete and so facilitating our own faith in general. So. Right. What are we trying to induce in children? We're trying to get them to be childlike. We're trying to get them to be more like Buddy, to maintain their innocence so that we can have that for ourselves to some extent, vicariously. So, for instance, Christmas was magical for me as a kid, even though I didn't need to believe in Santa Claus for that to be true. I think that there's something about Christmas which involves the re. Enchantment of the family, to use your word here, re enchantment. So family life or even human relatedness in general, you could think there's something really magic about it and in the broad sense, charming about it. There's a charm to it. There's a magical quality that's there in people's. The kinds of effects that they have on each other. Or the whole concept of a relationship in a way is like, you know, where is it metaphysically? What is it? Where is it? It's magic. So, but we lose sight of that. So family life easily becomes mundane. Children are going to school, people don't have as much time for each other. Parents at work, this, this and that. So part of what Christmas does is it gives people the opportunity to spend more time together because they're on vacation. It gives people the opportunity to enact generosity. So what's being ritualistically enacted? Giving without any thought necessarily of receiving. Although for me as a kid it was all about receiving, I guess. And if you believing in Santa Claus, it really is all about receiving. You have this infinitely generous entity with a bottomless bag who could deliver everything in one night. One might come to the point where one doesn't even believe in generosity. And that's part of what it means to be cynical. Other people are just self interested. That's the idea. So the concept of gift giving and Santa Claus as a gift giver, that the representation of generosity there is a way to counteract that cynicism. And part of the purpose of that is to re. Enchant the feeling of family life, because cynicism degrades or breaks those bonds. The less you believe in the good intentions of the other, the more you see their self interest at work and their flaws, which you do inevitably in a family. You see. Right. Your parents are not ideal. You find out at a certain point 28:40 Erin: in time, unless your mom is Mary Steenburgen and she's like, both hot and the nicest person ever, who's thrilled. 28:48 Wes: That's got its own set of problems that come with it. 28:50 Erin: Well, I mean, like, if you're Walter, why is it he not spending more time at home? He has the perfect wife. 28:55 Wes: Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So the more you become aware of these ungenerous characteristics in other human beings, the more the bonds of the relationship are degraded. So I think that's. I'm just trying to explain some of these connections between the re. Enchantment of the family feeling, which I think is a big part of Christmas. And it's a big part of these movies. Right. Where you got to get the families working again. And we saw it in Die Hard, getting a couple back together. So it's often about fixing families. And I think that's part of what Kind of Christmas does. Even the aesthetic with the lights and all of that. It's just meant to create this environment of togetherness somehow. 29:35 Erin: That's right. 29:35 Wes: Yeah. 29:36 Erin: I was thinking about that in terms of trying to test this theory that all Christmas movies are about religious conversion. And I was thinking about that being true in something like, say, Home Alone, where it seems like the religion is the family togetherness. Kevin, who wants escape from his family, has to be converted back to the family by their loss. And it's true in The Santa Clause, too. Like, Tim Allen is this divorced dad who needs a better relationship with his family, and he gets one by literally becoming Santa Claus, which is a little extreme. But that's not religious conversion so much as it is religious possession. But that principle of conversion, it seems like Santa can be in that role as the thing you have to believe in, or family can be in the role too. 30:23 Wes: Yeah. And I'm trying to suggest that the psychology of believing in Santa, it really is about believing in the family and believing, I think, for children, in a way, believing in parents, believing that parents have their best interests at heart, that their parents can be essentially generous because they're going to find out that their parents have their own interests and that the parents interests diverge from the interests of the child and that that's going to create a lot of conflicts. So I think we're trying to keep children. You know, it's a harsh reality that children are going to come to, especially in relationship, in relation to their parents. So we think we want to postpone that and we want to not let it be the whole story, so to speak, before we close. Yeah. Where does this stand in the Christmas movie pantheon? Is it. Is that the right word? 31:12 Erin: Even pantheon? It's pretty high up there. 31:13 Wes: Yeah. How would you rank after Die Hard, which is obviously number one? How would you rank? 31:20 Erin: There are certain things I watch every year. It's a quirky list. This is definitely one. And we'll say that this is also an incredibly quotable film. The number one most. 31:29 Wes: Let's hear some of them quoted. We didn't do a lot of that. 31:32 Erin: Yeah, well, the number one, I'm sure 31:34 Wes: listeners will be disappointed in, but yeah, 31:36 Erin: the number one most quoted line in my family is, but the children love the books. For some reason. That's like one of the. It's not one of your headliners. That's the nun saying it to Walter who wants to take a one. 31:51 Wes: Oh, yes. 31:52 Erin: For some reason, that's the thing that caught on. My little brother, my youngest brother was. He would have been two when it came out, but he grew up with it. And he used to answer the phone, Buddy the elf, what's your favorite color? Which he thought was hilarious to do around Christmas. That was back when we still had a landline and people still answered their phones. 32:13 Wes: That's great. 32:13 Erin: Yeah. Is this up there for you? 32:16 Wes: Yeah, I'm trying to remind myself, other than Die Hard, I mean. Yeah. What counts as a Christmas movie? I'm looking at a list. I'm looking at a list here. And yeah, Trading Places, which is great, but what makes that a Christmas movie? 32:29 Erin: I'm trying to think it takes place on Christmas. I always say it has to have two conditions. It either has to take place on Christmas or it has to have an epic battle between good and evil and snow. That makes it a Christmas movie. That's why Fellowship of the Ring is a Christmas movie or the first Harry Potter movie. I don't make the rules. I just. Well, I do make the rules in that instance, but I make them. And then. 32:52 Wes: This seems a little bit too inclusive to me. 32:55 Erin: No, it's actually not that. You'd be surprised how few films have snow in them. We made the argument, remember that Die Hard does Because of the paper falling from the sky. 33:04 Wes: I remember that. 33:06 Erin: But it also took place on Christmas, so that's enough my estimation. But yeah, my favorite Christmas movie is the Thin Man. 33:14 Wes: Okay. I think we watched that together once. 33:17 Erin: Yeah. And then I think my second favorite is the man who Came to Dinner, which is another movie that. That certain people will know, and then another movie that I won't mention, and then Elf. 33:27 Wes: What's the movie you're not mentioning? 33:29 Erin: I love this movie. That maybe some of our listeners will know this. 33:34 Wes: Don't be ashamed. 33:35 Erin: Come on. It's a made for TV movie called Eloise at Christmas Time. I love the Eloise books when I was younger. 33:44 Wes: I don't like the sound of that. 33:45 Erin: No, it's really cute. They're really cute. And they. They did these two. Eloise at the Plaza and then Eloise at Christmastime. These two made for TV movies on ABC Family with Julie Andrews as the nanny of Eloise. And I love these books growing up. And the eloise at Christmastime 1, she lives in the Plaza Hotel. So it's a New York Christmas movie. 34:08 Wes: Okay, so it's not like a Hallmark movie or something like that? 34:11 Erin: No, no, they're excellent. And they have excellent cast, too. Christine Baranski's in it. Jeffrey Tambor. 34:16 Wes: So there's no reason to be ashamed. 34:18 Erin: No, but it's just like, you know, I like weird things. No surprise to our listeners that I like weird things. But that's. That has a lot of nostalgia for me, that film. So I have to watch it every year. 34:30 Wes: All right. Well, that was fun. 34:32 Erin: It was. 34:33 Wes: Thank you. 34:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter nysubtext.

Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father—and his species—after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there’s a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness. But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man-child—a holy fool of sorts—who helps re-enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community. Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father and his species after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so, like many of its genre, the film Elf connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there's a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness. But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man child, a holy fool of sorts, who helps re enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Today we discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, did you believe in Santa Claus growing up? 1:33 Erin: I did. I remember when I stopped believing. 1:36 Wes: How old were you? 1:37 Erin: I think I was maybe five. I asked my mom if Santa was real, and she said, what do you think? And that was when I knew. I think it was actually from watching so many Christmas movies in which kids don't believe. And there's actually an element of these movies that kind of gives it away for kids that are maybe too young to be watching them or not, you know, like the target audience, I think I was for many of them, but there are so many questioning children. So many, so much crisis of faith, crises of faith in these films. And I picked up on that. That's why I asked her. And then she said, what do you think? And I was like, if it's not an immediate yes, then I'm guessing it's a no. 2:22 Wes: Right? 2:23 Erin: How old are you? 2:24 Wes: I never believed in Santa Claus, actually. 2:28 Erin: That makes a lot of sense. 2:30 Wes: Really? Are you calling me a cynic? So Christmas was very, very exciting for me as a kid. Still, Santa Claus wasn't required. It felt very magical, anyway. And then it occurred to me. So, yeah, so what are we doing? Why are we deceiving children in this way? Why are we brainwashing them? To believe in something that they're going to eventually find out is not true. 2:57 Erin: Well, if that's what you took from 2:59 Wes: this movie, couldn't we just do it with all the lights and presents and the. Do we need a mythical fat man giving out the presents, going down the chimney, doing all these very implausible things that with just a little rationality you can figure out? Yeah, that's not happening. I don't even have a chimney. 3:25 Erin: That's right. I liked that element in the Santa Claus, which we'll have to cover next year. But that element where they explain. Is that the movie where they explain how Santa comes into houses without chimneys and he goes through the radiator? 3:37 Wes: I don't know that I've seen it. 3:38 Erin: The Tim Allen Santa Claus. You've not seen it? 3:41 Wes: No, I haven't. 3:42 Erin: Well, wow. 3:43 Wes: It's possible, but it would have been so long ago, but I don't remember. But I'm not a big Tim Allen fan, honestly. 3:49 Erin: Yeah, I can't say that I am either, but I think that came out when I was right at the age to watch it. 3:55 Wes: Do you still get the warm and fuzzy feeling from Christmas or. 3:59 Erin: Oh, of course. I love Christmas. I love Christmas. That's my favorite thing. I don't know if we're going to get. I'll be up front. I don't know if we're going to get more than half an hour out of this movie. Do you have a. Do you have a grand philosophical interpretation 4:15 Wes: of something you would. 4:18 Erin: I took a few years. 4:19 Wes: I did a little work on this. I did some research into. 4:23 Erin: You did. 4:25 Wes: I did some research into elves, actually. And then I thought, well, he's human. What the fuck am I doing? Like, he's not even a real elf. Why do I care? I was curious about how the history of the mythology. I didn't get too much into it. And then how that evolved into there being Christmas elves, which, you know, it turns out not to be that interesting. Someone put it in the story and Santa was called a jolly elf at one point, you know, in a story. And then he had these little helper elves. I liked the beginning of this movie where they sort of run through a few different elements of. Well, I don't know if it's. You would call it elf mythology, but one of them is. One is straight out of the Brothers Grimm, right? The cobbler goes to sleep and then the elves make the shoes. And I didn't reread the fairy tale. I remember reading it as a kid and enjoying it. A lot. And actually, it was just a few years ago. I think I reread every Grimm fairy tale, but I don't remember any of the other details. Like why wasn't the cobbler making his own shoes? Do you remember? 5:27 Erin: No, I have not read that, I think, since I was a kid. Yeah, yeah. 5:31 Wes: But in the film, the elves, as the narrator is describing all of this, you get little vignettes. And so in this one, the elves call the guy a lazy bum, which I thought was very interesting in light of all the other little riffs that they do on the industriousness of the elves as compared to human beings. And, you know. Right. So Buddy is. He's only making 85 Etch A Sketches in the required time. Who knows? I don't remember if they said what that time is, if that's at every day, whereas the quota is 1000. Or the fact that the elves are happy being at work constantly. And as soon as Christmas is over, they celebrate. And you think it's the time for them to relax, but they just begin working again for. For the next Christmas. So that interested me, this idea of potentially as helpers, but something that offsets the fact. So they sort of become embodiments of industriousness and complement us to the extent that we lack it. If you go backwards in the mythology, they're a little bit more sinister elves. Right. And they could help or they could hurt, but they could be causes of sickness. And it's not really until, I think, the 18th and 19th century, they get. Well, actually, no, as early as Renaissance, and the Renaissance with Shakespeare, for instance, where they kind of get conflated with fairies. And so they might be mischievous, but not necessarily evil. Right. And then you get this evolution into what we see in Grimm and then what we see with Christmas. So they are sort of an ad hoc. A very ad hoc addition to a very ad hoc tradition, this Christmas pagan tradition that's been fused with Christianity. 7:14 Erin: I think in Tolkien, he makes this a little bit more explicit, but it's almost like they're angels. 7:20 Wes: Yeah. 7:20 Erin: You know, there's an angelic quality where they're. They're there to sort of prop up humanity. For Christmas elves, it's just on the one day, I suppose. But, yeah, there's something like they spend their whole lives, like guardian angels or something, sort of taking care of, looking after humans. And I think in Tolkien, this, the extent. I don't know if there's. If there's a vast trove of secondary literature about the 2003 elf. But all I did was look at the IMDb trivia page, which actually I had to give up. There are so many hundreds of entries on the IMDb trivia page for Elf. But it was fascinating, and I reread the Roger Ebert review to see what he had to say, and not surprisingly, he loved it. But the IMDb trivia page mentioned that Jon Favreau put in so many Lord of the Rings references throughout the movie, which I thought I had picked up on at one point. I can't remember the exact point, but I had no idea the extent to which the two were overlapping. You know, even the. The shot of Buddy crossing the mountains, you know, the snowy mountaintop. Apparently that was footage from Lord of the Rings that I don't know. Yeah. Like, it didn't. It didn't go into detail. So maybe. And maybe it wasn't even correct, because I know these things can be added by users. So I don't even know how it looked very realistic. It didn't look like that was digitally added, that Buddy was digitally added in. So I don't know if that's even true. But it certainly looks like the snowy mountaintop that they're all going across in Fellowship. 8:43 Wes: Yeah. And Tolkien is working off a, you know, I guess a Nordic or Icelandic tradition in which elves can be these. Well, they're angelic, as you said. At a certain point in the history, they become something more and more angelic. And in any case, they always are mediators between humanity and another. Right. Supernatural world. 9:05 Erin: That's right. 9:06 Wes: And a supernatural world that's more pagan, more associated with nature as opposed to. Right. A monotheistic, transcendent deity. 9:16 Erin: There's a reading of this film in which Walter is the protagonist and Will Ferrell, fulfilling the function of an elf in the film is kind of the Clarence who comes down to George Bailey. 9:29 Wes: I was going to make that comparison to Clarence. Yeah. 9:32 Erin: Even though he goes through his own crisis. There's the scene on the bridge that Buddy. It's clearly shot to reference It's Wonderful Life, the bridge scene where he's kind of giving up, and that's when he sees Santa's sleigh descending on Central Park. Oh, it was the Ringwraiths. That was it. It was the Central park rangers as the Ringwraiths. That was. 9:52 Wes: Oh, yes, yes, of course. 9:54 Erin: The moment that it triggered that connection to Lord of the Rings. And then I saw on the trivia page that that was quite deliberate. 10:00 Wes: Right, right. You brought up Clarence, who I think is sort of adjacent to this, there's this holy fool theme, right? So you see it in various movies, like being there, even Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. It's all over literature. Myshkin in Dostoevsky's the Idiot, Alyosha to some extent, and then film again. Forrest Gump, you know. And it's something that has deep roots in Christianity, of course, right? Mystic fools and prophets and things like that. And. And also in ancient Greece, right, The cynics who sort of ignore social conventions. So whether you're ignoring social conventions, I mean, the fool is oblivious to all these social conventions. So that sets up this interesting satire on society as we know it. Because it's too cynical, it's too self aware, in a sense. It's so self aware that it loses sight of itself. Its self awareness becomes too cynical. 10:57 Erin: When I was thinking about what we were going to talk about today on my notepad, the only thing that I had in the upper right hand corner, which is where I write themes that I'd like to talk about on the podcast, the only two words I had were cynicism and sugar. And I thought that looks like the world's most depressing breakfast cereal or something. Cynicism, sugar. But then luckily I did. I went for a walk and had a chance to sort of cogitate a little more about this. And. And I did think about certain religious connections in the film. I wanna address what you. What you've already said about work. It occurred to me how much the film is about work. And that also then made me think about. Of course I'm gonna think about this faith in works and the idea of the religious conversion as being sort of essential to the Christmas movie. So I mean, in a way that's kind of every movie. You could argue that whatever sort of growth the protagonist undergoes maybe is a religious conversion. But because this belief in Santa thing, a common trope in these Christmas movies, and usually a cynical parent has to undergo some faith conversion over the course of the film, or maybe a cynical kid or something. That seems like a stand in, of course, for a belief in some sort of larger religion. Larger than the belief in Santa Claus, if there is such a religion. But we could take either one of those things and I think it'll lead us back to the other eventually. 12:20 Wes: So work and faith, are you saying? 12:22 Erin: Yeah, the connection maybe between creativity and work is one which is. Which really interested me. And maybe that would kind of lead us into faith as well, this creative idea. Because as you mentioned, there's a huge emphasis on work from the Very beginning of the film. And the elves, I don't know if they comply with union guidelines about working hours and stuff like that. I mean, there seems to be a great deal of creativity in what they do or sort of implied creativity, or they're extremely resourceful, even as there's a. An assembly line quality and a literal churning things out because you're 1,900 something behind the pace. And something about their work, which maybe in Elfland and in the North Pole seems a little bit rote to us. It translates as creativity in the human world somehow. And the elves seem very satisfied with it. This is their whole purpose. And they're really happy to make all this stuff. And they're really happy to start working again. As soon as Santa comes back from delivering all the presents, they're happy to start all over again. So I have all this energy. And so maybe creativity is slightly the wrong word. But their sort of Venn diagram, say, of this work and creativity or energy or something is sort of perfect circle. Whereas the atmosphere in New York City seems to be one of creative depletion. And that is a theme that's revisited again and again in all the New York scenes. You know that Walter, our first introduction to him, besides taking the books away from that nun, is. You know, that he signed off on a children's book that's missing two pages. May. Somebody would watch that and say he's abandoning his own inner child or something like that. But to me, he's just not doing a good job at his work. His head writers want to bring in another writer to save the publishing house to create this new. So the writers can't even do their job. They're sort of tapped or depleted creatively. Gimbels is kind of. We get the idea that it's sort of a sad place to work. Except for Buddy and his judging the toyland up. The supervisor assumes that Gimbels has sent someone in from corporate because it's too good. It's a little too good, I think he says. I even saw it in the world's best cup of coffee in that diner. That's sort of overly energetic and cliched marketing for what's ultimately a poor product. There's something missing. There's some spark that's gone. And Buddy imports that from the North Pole. 14:53 Wes: Well, just to back up a little bit, the reason why I asked you about whether you believed in Santa Claus is because I thought it was very interesting that in these films, right, at a. At a literal level, the thing that people are Being converted to believe is obviously something that we none of us believe. It's supposed to be this big magical moment when Santa Claus shows up in real life as if it's like the return of Christ or something like that. But you know, how are we supposed to get much feeling out of that when it's something none of us believe in? So I thought that was very interesting. In the end, of course it is about spirit. I think, as you were getting at, part of that is about creativity, but it's more about spirit in general. So in the movie it's specifically Christmas spirit, which depends on whether or not you believe in Santa Claus. And then probably more broadly about whether you're more generous or more cynical. And there's a lot of other associated qualities which I would just think of as maybe spirit in general. Part of the lack of spirit is about the day to day cynicism that develops because our social relations are so necessarily false. So that's what the world, you know, the world's best cup of coffee. We simply lie all the time. You know, you can call them white lies, right. So we don't think that the putting the world's best cup of coffee on a sign. We would never think, oh, that's ridiculous. Even though it is ridiculous at a literal level. It's not only a lie, it's just a crazy lie. This is the place of the world's best cup of coffee. So when you insert a character, that environment who does take everything literally and also in a childlike way expects people to be honest, it's kind of hilarious, right? On the one hand his naivete is funny, but on the other hand it's funny that we're so dishonest in these ways in our social interactions. 16:41 Erin: Yeah, that makes me think too of the theme of decline in the film. So there's the creative depletion in New York, but there's also the idea which we get from, from Santa, which I should say, you know, I don't know if you need Christmas spiritual of this movie or just 70s TV spirit, because I'm just happy to see Bob Newhart and Ed Asner. You know, I want to believe in Ed Asner, Lou Grant, the world's best boss. Of course he can. Of course he can inspire the troops. You know, there's this idea that there used to be an abundance of Christmas spirit, now there isn't. We get a little bit of this 60s kind of flavor with James Caan's relationship with Susan Wells and giving up Buddy for adoption and something being Lost there culturally. Because I was thinking about the fact that we could just argue that Will Ferrell is someone from the past. You know, reminded me of the movie Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraser, where he comes out of the bunker after 30 years. And, you know, I don't think I've seen it. Okay. It's literally. It's just a twist on a time travel movie. It's this idea of an idealized past where everybody had Christmas spirit, believed in things. You know, it was the forties or something like. And in a way, it's as though Will Ferrell's character is not from the North Pole. He's just from an idealized American past before some sort of rupture, the kind of rupture that the movie sort of gestures in the direction of with the James Caan thing, you know, with the backstory there, before some sort of rupture happened. And, you know, whatever. Vietnam and the entrance of this kind of mass cynicism and the decline of whatever mom and pop stores and apple pies cooling on windowsills or whatever. Whatever the. The, you know, the symbol of this. Right. So that seems to be an element there as well, that there was a time where maybe that sign, world's best cup of coffee was true. And Will Ferrell is taking that. Or Buddy, I should say, is taking that at face value in a way that somebody who got out of a time machine might take it at face value that it's not just this childlike thing, but a sort of collective innocence that he seems to represent there. 18:50 Wes: Yeah. I like this idea of an idealized past because it points to the fact that the impulse is to reform ourselves in the sense of becoming less cynical and doing all the things associated with that. And I think it probably means as well, Right. Being closer to one's family. So Walter, for instance, being a better dad and a better member of his family. And that's certainly. You know, that's certainly the thing. I mentioned Christmas being kind of magical. When I was a kid, I felt closeness to my family was a big part of it. And I had, like, five siblings. I had this desire, this hope that we would all live together forever. Little did I know how. Be careful what you wish for, but not that it happened. I guess it. 19:34 Erin: My case is the be careful what you wish for. 19:37 Wes: Right. Right. You learn as you get older that the idealized versions of these relationships go away and the real ones are much more complicated. And, of course, the idealized versions of the past that we have are not real. But I Think part of this is important because also too just the location. New York City plays this role, or at least it did at the time. And it plays this role a lot in 80s movies, I think, where it's sort of the gruff exterior with a heart of gold type of place, where New York is dog eat dog and it's a place of people are going to make it and make money and all these things. But you get this interesting combination in New York of incredible aspiration and desire to do important things, to do big things, which is really inspiring. And it's inspiring for me, just even when I'm in the city, it's an inspiring place. And then the undercurrent of cynicism that goes with that. So it's an interesting contradiction and a great location for a film like this because in some sense, what's happening right when the spirit is restored, when people believe in Santa again, you're kind of having your cake and eating it too. You're getting all this aspirational stuff, which the city already, in a sense, has. But you're cutting out the more competitive and maybe more narcissistic element of that. So the part of work, just getting back to this work theme which involves love, or love of what you're doing, and creativity is preserved in the part that's just competitive and about narcissism. Like with the Miles character. Right. The great children's author who's full of himself. Standish. Is that his name? 21:11 Erin: Miles Finch. 21:13 Wes: Finch. 21:14 Erin: Different Miles. We just had Thanksgiving. Miles Standish is a pilgrim. 21:21 Wes: Right. That's crazy. That is crazy. Yeah. The unconscious is a weird thing. All right, so what's his name again? I can't even think of. 21:30 Erin: Miles Finch. 21:31 Wes: The real name. Miles Finch. Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. In line with your ideas about work. New York is a place of work and a place of creative work and great aspirations. And we. Part of the desire seems to be to give full voice to the parts of work that involve love and generosity and again, loving what you do. And then to de emphasize the parts that are more about self interest. 21:55 Erin: I like that. This characterization of the undercurrent of cynicism seems to have taken over the whole city. Right. With this creativity crisis that they're having. And it seems that Buddy is capable of seeing the city anew. It's almost like everybody has watched too many movies that take place in New York and they've become desensitized to the magic of the place and, you know, sort of symbolized in his Little snow globe, which. 22:21 Wes: Right. And the Empire State Building. I wanted to bring that up. Right. Yeah. This just sort of iconic symbol of emblem of ambition and aspiration. 22:30 Erin: That's right. Yeah. For me, it's the Chrysler Building. I always thought the Empire State Building was sort of ruined by being too blocky on the bottom. 22:36 Wes: Yeah. 22:38 Erin: But I still love it. I still love it. But, yeah, the snow globe, which you might think is just the kind of cheap trinket that you would get in New York. That would almost be too cliche or something to get a snow globe. Unless you're the kind of person who collects that sort of thing. But that's what he's about. Seeing the place anew. Seeing the. Rather than letting the cynicism be dominant, Letting the aspiration and the magic and the wonder of the city be dominant. And so getting excited about the elevator buttons that light up or the revolving doors or the Christmas trees, which, you know, everybody seems to be just walking by except for Buddy, who's really appreciating them, and then gets to see the Rockefeller center tree. So, yeah, I like that a lot. 23:15 Wes: I think the other aspect here, it's about family, as I mentioned, and about community. And that's something that. Right. The urban environment seems to undermine, as opposed to. Right. Smaller villages or communities. I think when you think of elves, you think of. And fairies, you think of these more rustic environments. Right. They're associated with nature, and they come from nature. And in a way, you might see it as representative of what the city excludes ultimately. So as it undermines community, it's unlivable for the spirit world. 23:48 Erin: I'd love to make more of this if we can, because I think there's something we could say about the fact that Walter doesn't even know he has this son. And in a way, that's sort of emblematic of an urban environment. Everybody is sort of estranged from each other, or strangers are living half on top of each other in this way that. I love the fact that this. That Gimbel's, you know, sort of imagined as being, I guess, in the vicinity of Macy's and therefore kind of close to the Empire State Building. That you don't quite know why Walter would be walking by the Gimbel store window on his way to the Empire State Building. But regardless, maybe he would. But, yeah, you know, he sees Buddy asleep in the window. So there's this coincidence element of everybody, like, being kind of thrown together. I might have mentioned this in our Rear Window episode. I'm not sure if I did, but I used to see there was a time where whenever I would go into the city, I would run into people that I knew. And there was a billboard that was right over the escalator in Grand Central in a place that I would always use this particular escalator because of where my train usually this was at a time when I was taking the train into New York three, four times a week. And the billboard said, 8 million people in this city. And you have to run into that guy or something. Something like that. You know, like the billboard was commenting on this phenomenon of somehow of everybody being half on top of you and having strangers half on top of you, but also that you could be next to on a subway, someone who you might have some sort of connection with and never know it because of the anonymity of that. So there's a closeness and yet emotional estrangement at the same time. And then the surprise when that's when you actually do see someone who you, in fact, recognize. And how uncanny that can be, specifically in the city environment where you're passing hundreds of faces which are anonymous to you in any given moment. And I wonder if there's something to be said about the flip side of that. Like the North Pole environment. I was thinking about the fact that everybody has names that are just like Ming Ming and Choo Choo. And there's a certain. You know, they all have the double names and they all. Because they're all the same height and. Except for Buddy, obviously, because they're all the same height and they're all the same. They have these elfin features. They all look like they're part of one family. But then there's also a kind of anonymity in that as well. Like, there are a few distinguishing features among them. I don't know whether that's a mirror of the urban environment in New York. If that's a sort of topsy turvy element, if it's pulled inside out, where you have an environment that's crowded but everybody looks like you, as opposed to a diverse, crowded environment. I'm not sure what to say about that, but I just want to bring it up because it seems relevant and it seems related to this idea of having a son you don't know about in the same city as you. He traveled to get there. But, you know, that kind of principle. 26:39 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting. You mentioned how, in a way, Walter is also the protagonist. Right? Buddy's the protagonist. Walter is the protagonist. On the one hand, Buddy is a kind of angelic figure like Clarence and helping Walter change, or like the spirits in A Christmas Carol with Scrooge or any other sort of mentor figure or catalyst figure. Although often there it's an interesting spin on that to make that person the holy fool. So Buddy gets his own problem that has to be solved because it seems like he's. He doesn't have any problems really. If you can enjoy pop tarts and candy on spaghetti, I don't think you need much else in life. Yeah, I guess. I guess the. The. His problem is twofold, right? Yeah. He finds himself in a. In a community. In it. Well, is it a real community? Right. It's a place of spirit, but it's a place of. If there's kind of a source of spirit in the world, that's the source. Maybe, but maybe it's too pure. Right. It's a place where people just love to do assembly line work, for instance. They've got the spirit, but it means they're willing to work 24 hours a day in the factory. And so it turns what would otherwise be a dystopian environment. And that's what the satire of the movie is playing with, right? This idea of these industrious helper elves being essentially depressed wage slaves or something like that. Well, without even a wage. 28:08 Erin: So just regular slaves. 28:10 Wes: So. So, right. So in other words, there's. There's something potentially superficial about that environment. You know, any idealized or mythological environment is necessarily superficial in one way or another, I think. So Buddy's problem, I think is. Is threefold, right? He finds out that he doesn't belong to that community because he's not of the right race or species. I don't know, which is an interesting way to put it. But. So, so he doesn't belong. But he also doesn't belong in the sense that he's human and an other world. It's a non human world, which is. Right. Something much more important than a racial distinction. Because the human world has this important relationship to the non human world, to the spiritual world. It needs that source, right? It needs that injection from this other world just to be the human world. The human world needs the alien in order to be what it is in this interesting way. But you can't just be off in that alien world fully and expect to belong to it. So Buddy doesn't have a community in the fullest sense up in the North Pole. He has to come back down to Earth, so to speak, to humanity to get that. And at the same time, it's gonna mean finding A father figure within that world. Not just an infinitely benign Bob Newhart type of father, but a real father. 29:32 Erin: Yeah. That's good. That helps me to understand what's kind of weirdly similar about the North Pole and New York City. Because in the North Pole, of course, he stands out. He's six, three, or however tall he is. And, yeah, not of the same species or whatever we can say. 29:49 Wes: And he's Will Ferrell, which just adds a lot. 29:51 Erin: And he's Will Ferrell. 29:52 Wes: Craziness to him. 29:53 Erin: Exactly. And then, you know, and then in New York, he also doesn't fit in. So there are these two communities in which the elves are united by their love of assembly line work and their spirit, et cetera. And then the New York community is reunited by anonymity and cynicism. And that is also a world in which he does not. He's not a natural fit, though. He adapts and also gets it to adapt to him. I mean, there's a way that he's read immediately in the film. I mean, this is also the great thing about New York is that he could be walking down the street in this elf costume and people don't really look at him. But then he's instantly read in the Empire State Building as being a Christmas gram, you know, so there's a way in which she doesn't actually attract all that much attention. 30:36 Wes: Remarkably, there's lots of people in costumes on the streets of New York. 30:39 Erin: That's right. You could be. Be whatever type of person you are, as long as you're cynical and keep to yourself. 30:46 Wes: Freak flag. Yeah. There should have been a nightclub scene or something. 30:52 Erin: Right, Right. 30:53 Wes: He comes all the way to New York and he meets this manic pixie girl. 30:56 Erin: Well, she's not in this film, but. Yeah. 30:59 Wes: You don't think she is. 31:00 Erin: She's pixie, like, I suppose, but she's not the. She's not the typical manic pixie dream girl. 31:06 Wes: I don't know where the manic pixie girl is. 31:07 Erin: I think. You don't? No. No offense. The. The. The trope is, you know, the muse who's this dreamy, you know, gets the guy to loosen up and connect him to his creative side. And the word manic in the title, as well as she's full of energy and Vim. 31:28 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking she's kind of quirky and. Yeah, right. So he's not the cynic. So he can't. 31:35 Erin: Her Persona is. She's a sort of deflated version of herself in this film. Yeah. 31:39 Wes: Right, right. There's the manic one, right, Buddy? Yeah. It's not like he's gonna be brought out of his shell, but yeah, she's a facilitator. So she's elf. Like, maybe the word pixie is what I'm focusing on, but there is an actual elf like quality to her. She's small and she dresses up as an elf department store. I just think they're taking that too seriously. 32:00 Erin: Well, she has elfin features. You know, she has big eyes, elfin features, sort of heart shaped face. 32:06 Wes: And she's quite. What is the word? Chill. 32:09 Erin: Are elves chill? 32:11 Wes: No, but I'm thinking she stands out from the crowd. 32:16 Erin: She sings. 32:16 Wes: She sings. And that's an important part of the movie where she gets over her fear singing in public and facilitates singing with 32:24 Erin: crowd, which is what being an elf is all about. 32:26 Wes: Christmas cheer and Christmas spirit and get the sleigh running again. Let me just put it this way. She's an important mediator. And Buddy's adaptation to that environment, although I'm putting a question mark after that, is she. This is the way I was thinking of it. But does he need her in the film at all or is she just extra? 32:44 Erin: I think that in these Christmas movies, which are about belief, which is most Christmas movies, the person who's not being believed needs at least one ally. Right. Michael sort of fulfills that function. But Jovie, I think, needs to. I think it's important that he's propped up by more than one person. And, you know, it's funny because she's an elf, but she. I guess she sort of integrates the North Pole and New York perfectly in her person because she's also this personification of this cynical place with a heart of gold. Like, she's actually very mushy on the inside. And that's the appeal. That's why she's attracted to whatever it is that Buddy is offering her. A chance to not be cynical. That desire is very, very close to the surface in her, though. It doesn't seem to be. 33:28 Wes: I mean, she comes across as solemn and her water's been turned off and she's working a job that she doesn't particularly enjoy. 33:36 Erin: She can't make those six inches. We both went there right away. 33:41 Wes: Yeah. You really? Okay. It's impossible. I love that scene. 33:44 Erin: Inches. I love that guy. He's great. 33:48 Wes: Yeah. 33:49 Erin: Code word is Santa's got a brand new bag. 33:52 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. I just love the randomness of the whole. Yeah, you gotta cut the ribbons this way. It's impossible. So I guess am I trying to think of her as the mediator's mediator, in a way. But now you have me questioning whether she's really playing that role at all, any role in integrating him into this world, because. Right. So from one perspective, it's just a romantic subplot that every movie needs to have, or most movies need to have, especially comedy. But is it tacked on, or does it thematically line up in some interesting way? And I might just be working, trying too hard here. 34:30 Erin: So if the idea is that everybody needs every. Santa needs someone to believe in them in the movie when nobody believes that they're Santa or nobody believes that they're really an elf, if they need at least one person to verify their legitimacy or to prop them up a little bit. You know, I'm being a little tongue in cheek here, but maybe the idea is that New York has so many people in it that need to be converted that we need at least two people for this particular film. This film needs more. More people propping it up to believe in Buddy. And the more I think about the community element of New York, the more I think that this is really a theme in the film. It's trying to actually turn New York, over the course of the film into a small town, in a way. And the fact that Buddy would have these converts along the way and work on the place like he would if he were in a small town or having entered a small town where he could have these personal relationships. It seems that there are these other mediators who are needed because it's his two initial converts, it's Jovie and Michael who end up helping in that crucial way to get Santa's sleigh off the ground. And we have a local news anchor. Like, there are quite a bit of indications that Jovie and Michael are really the facilitators of Santa's sleigh getting off the ground in that final scene or almost final scene. And over the course of that scene, because of the list and because of the local news, you know, it's New York City, but it's local New York one. Right. Like, New York becomes a small town in that final scene. I think, you know, first of all, we have the fact that because they live off the park, Walter and Emily. Emily, right. I almost said Mary. Like, she's Mary Steenburgen. And it's also like Joseph, Mary, and they have a son. Anyway, you know, they are able to get there really fast because they live right off the park. And then there's this local news anchor who the guy is ribbing her for having just come from Buffalo. So she's moved up into the metropolitan area, but it's still local news. You know, she's doing a little puff piece about people thinking that they've seen Santa. And then when Michael starts reading out the names and everybody in the area is watching, there's this recognition. And Jovie is able to come because she sees it on the news, you know, so there's a. There's that drawing things in. So it's like they live in Mayberry, is what I'm trying to say. There's an element of this which is about belief, which we have to get into, but there's also an element of this that's about recognition. That's a crucial component of the belief, and it's about turning the stranger into someone who you know by name, which seems to be part of this de. Cynicization, you know, the way of cutting through the cynicism of New York, which seems, you know, related to. Part of what's so cynical about it is like the. The anonymity, what you can get away with because of the anonymity of the place. And so that knowing people, that recognition, knowing their name and then knowing what they want, too, that seems. That seems a crucial component of this as well. 37:27 Wes: Yeah. And that seems to be part of the way the Santa myth functions as well. Right. He's got everyone's name on a list. He knows if you're naughty or nice, and he's bringing presents to every single child in the world in one night, doing something impossible. But it shrinks everything, right? 37:45 Erin: Yes. 37:46 Wes: You're supposed to suspend disbelief and think the entire world could be one tiny community in a sense, where. Yeah. If we lived in the village, we could be Santa Claus to that village. We could go around and provide a gift to every family, for instance. So it takes this village feeling, this small community feeling, as you're saying, and makes it feel like you can globalize it. 38:11 Erin: Yeah. And that seems to be that conversion that needs to happen where the world is shrunk. That's New York City. Coming out to meet Buddy. Right. Buddy has to adapt a little bit to. To New York, but it also seems important that New York adapt a little bit to him, that he's going to be a stranger either in the North Pole or New York City, so long as there isn't this adaptation. And it seems to be a mutual one. But I love that idea of shrinking the world as being central to the Santa myth. That's great. 38:39 Wes: Okay. That's the end of part one of our discussion of elf. 38:43 Erin: Can't believe we're making it to two parts. Sorry. 38:46 Wes: Well, the second part may not be so long, but we'll see. 38:51 Erin: I'm impressed. 38:51 Wes: We will. Yeah. I'm sure. I wonder how people are reacting to the, you know, the attempt. 38:57 Erin: We're taking this seriously. 38:59 Wes: We're doing it sophisticated. Yeah. Taking it so seriously. Is that a good thing or bad? 39:02 Erin: Sure. 39:03 Wes: But anyway, it is what it is. It's the format of our show. But yeah, so we will. [email protected] subtextpodcast or right on the Apple app. Or you can wait a week or so into the second part. Thank you. 39:17 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Erin just published her first book, “Avail,” which you can order here: https://www.pauldrybooks.com/products/avail “Avail” features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder. Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the “veils” with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced—insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs “to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead.” During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes “a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay.” And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag’s “missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction.” By the end of the collection, O’Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves. Upcoming Episodes: “The Third Man,” “Elf,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:08 Wes: Today we have a very special episode of Subtext. We will be talking about Erin's forthcoming book, Avail. It'll be published on January 20, 2026 by Paul Dry Books. It won't surprise listeners that this is a really wonderful book. It reflects not just Erin's mastery of her craft, but also her extensive knowledge of the arts more generally and her interest in film. You can pre order it on Amazon.com right now. If you go to subtextpodcast.com avail, you'll be redirected to that Amazon page. You can also find Erin's poems in the Yale Review, Bad Lilies, Agni, the Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 poems, Wild Court, the Hopkins Review, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Erin graduated from the University of Florida's MFA program. She's currently a PhD student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she is a Steffensen Cannon Fellow and the Senior Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. She's also a co host of Subtext. Welcome to your own show, Erin. 1:14 Erin: Wow. It's great to be here. It's strange to be here in this capacity. 1:19 Wes: So we don't. Is this going to be an interview? Is this going to be a regular subtext discussion? Am I going to get in a big argument with you about what something means? 1:27 Erin: Who knows? I'm nervous. I'm nervous to be our first ever guest. It doesn't really count, does it? 1:33 Wes: Kind of counts. It's weird. You're playing two roles at once here. 1:37 Erin: I know. 1:37 Wes: Yeah, I feel a bit nervous, too. I don't know why. Like I told you, it's not my book. Why should I be nervous? 1:45 Erin: Well, thank you so much for doing this. It's really sweet. 1:48 Wes: Well, it's sweet of you to. To be here and to be a successful poet that I'm co hosting the podcast with, as opposed to a failed poet. Finally, you've proven yourself as a successful poet. But I think most listeners know you're a poet, but I don't know if they've read your poetry. It's not like we're always advertising that on the podcast. They probably many may not know how well published you are, and I think we've very rarely touched on this forthcoming book. And the other thing they wouldn't know about you is really the autobiographical element of how it is that you ended up becoming a poet. They probably know that you're a classic film buff and that you're into the arts and maybe even at some point you mentioned being a jazz singer, but they Might be curious about how all of that comes together as it does in your book. But. But anyway. Erin. Yeah. How is it that you ended up becoming a poet? 2:45 Erin: Have I ever told you this story? Maybe I mentioned it on the podcast. The story of the $500. Did you ever hear about this? 2:50 Wes: Nope. 2:51 Erin: Oh, I got into poetry as a money making scheme like you do. 2:54 Wes: As we. As we all do. 2:57 Erin: I was a senior in college. I wanted to go on a spring break trip to. I think I'm getting this right. Lake Lure, North Carolina. Yeah. Which was one of the filming locations of the great co classic Dirty Dancing. We were all going on a spring break trip there for some reason, or there was a spring break trip planned. Someone had done the math and figured out that for all of us to go down there for a week, including the gas and everything else, if we split everything, it was going to cost $500. And the same day that they came up with this figure, the English department bulletin board had posted this poetry contest and the prize was $500. So I thought, here's a great way that I can go on this spring break trip. I'll just write a poem. This is an absolutely true story. It's ridiculous. And I thought I was an English major. I loved reading poetry, loved literature. I hadn't really written it. I had written some things as a kid, like some sort of some juvenile. But I was singing at that point. I was really involved in the music department. I was ostensibly an English major, but turning in all my papers at the last possible minute because I was singing so much and spending so much time in the music building or traveling to shows or doing musical theater. And so I thought, well, I'll write a sonnet because that's short. And anyway, I wrote it. I won the $500. I went to the resort where they filmed Dirty Dancing. I had just an okay time, but the point was that it gave me some. 4:19 Wes: Didn't do any Dirty. Dirty Dancing. 4:20 Erin: No, no, I did not. It was a pretty tame trip though. There was. One of my friends was waking up at 10 o' clock in the morning, walking over to the fridge and immediately cracking a beer. It was. People were drinking all day long. I wasn't doing any of that. I didn't know how to have fun at that time in my life though. That's not my idea of fun. Anyway. I don't like beer, for one. 4:40 Wes: That's true. You know, that's interesting. I'd never thought about that. I'd never seen you drink a beer. 4:44 Erin: What's the point of the story. 4:47 Wes: You won a contest. 4:48 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. And one of my professors who read the poem said, you know, you should write a couple more of these. It was a poem about one of my aunts who I was very close to. And so I wrote, I think, two other poems about two other aunts. It's convenient that I had so many. And then I just really didn't think anything of it, though. This professor said, you know, I think you might. I think you might have a talent in this, and maybe you would want to pursue an MFA program. You know, I had obviously filed it away somewhere in my mind, but I thought, you know, as soon as I graduate, I'm gonna go into jazz singing, and I'm gonna try that out for a while and see what happens. You know, Basically, I did the jazz singing thing for a few years. It got burnt out. And I remembered what my professor had told me, got back in touch with him, wrote enough poems to make up the 10 pages or whatever that I needed to even apply to one of these places, and ended up going to the University of Florida for my mfa. You know, poetry, I think, was something that I did to back away from something else. I backed into poetry. 5:44 Wes: See, I thought you were gonna say that you found out that the money wasn't good enough in jazz, so then you had to switch to poetry. 5:50 Erin: Yeah. You know, everything I've been involved with in my life is so lucrative. 5:54 Wes: You backing into it has me flashing to Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. Exactly that meme. 6:00 Erin: Yes. Yeah. That's my whole life right there. 6:03 Wes: Happened in on something you shouldn't have stepped into and back slowly out of the room, maybe. 6:12 Erin: Yeah. So that's the story. It's silly. 6:14 Wes: That's a good segue to the book. So I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for your book because it really does bring together your many different interests, including singing and the arts and classic film, and combines that in a really interesting way with a certain autobiographical element. So including your childhood sickness with a blood disorder and your relationship with your grandfather, which was very close, and he had a role in the development of your interests in film. And then also your mother's more recent sickness. And then, of course, it's all tied together with this theme of the veil. And then the related idea of availing a V A I L, which is the title of your book. Shall we start with just how. It's a big. I know it's a big general question, but how all of that is all of that related thematically and what inspired you to. To go down that route? 7:11 Erin: Yeah. So all these poems, I think, just reflect my interest, the interest that I've picked up over the course of my life. My grandfather was a classic movie buff, and so movies were a big part of my childhood and art was too. Going to art museums with them and music, they were very big into opera especially and all kinds of classical music. When I got sick, a TV was put in my room with a little built in vcr. And my grandfather would tape. You know, he would. We didn't have cable up there, so he would. He would tape things off of TCM onto VHS tape and bring it over to me and I would then watch the VHS tapes and. And so I became interested, even more interested in classic movies than I already was, which was which I already had a sort of natural affinity for them. I went through this experience of the blood disorder and then as soon as I got well enough to go back to school, I just didn't talk about it for years and years. A lot of people never knew that I had this problem. Even though it required maintenance and even though it's actually caused me problems on and off over the years, I always hid them. One of the things that the essay confronts was my reticence to talk about it. I think that became part of the story. Like, why was this something that I was not comfortable talking about that ended up being the thing that I had to confront as much as the experience of the disorder itself. 8:33 Wes: On page 84 of your book, there's a prose poem titled To Cast, Throw Draw Veil over and it begins with the line, your work does not contain the necessary self revelation. The list of things you'd rather not say is long. You claim to reveal yourself by hiding in your interests. Say that the shape of your preoccupations forms the outline of the body. There seems to be a connection there between the idea of veiling and then this question of the role of self revelation and poetry, which I've heard you talk a little bit about before, and your reluctance to do that. Did you want to say a little bit more about that? 9:11 Erin: Yeah, I think, you know, I went into my MFA program so green, and I was lucky enough to have a teacher in Ange Mlinko in my very first workshop who encouraged us to think about our own origin stories or sort of personal mythologies. And this was the thing that was at the root of, you know, the blood disorder was. Was at the root of so many things that I was interested in. And yet it was something that at that time, the People who knew me really well, you know, some of my closest friends did not know about this. I had really buried it when. When someone did learn this story, they said, well, this is such a great story. And it's. It explains why you are interested in so many. So many of these things, you know, especially the old movies. And I didn't want to talk about myself. I was. I was reticent to do that. I wanted to talk about the things that I was interested in. And I thought that perhaps that was enough, that talking about these interests was enough, and that I didn't have to really involve myself at all. And then some very smart friends said that this was starting. You know, my lack of talking about this was starting to become its own issue. It was starting to exert a kind of force on the. On the poems. It started to become the elephant in the room. So finally, when I went into my PhD program, I thought, I really should talk about this. I really should find a way. And I realized that the way in would be to talk about my resistance, why I didn't want to talk about it. I was reading Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, in which she talks about this concept of aidos, which is this idea of having appropriate shame about something or shame in the presence of another. And this idea of decorum covering oneself, not wanting to reveal too much of oneself. And she specifically talks about the veil as a sort of metonym or symbol of this aidos that women would use the veil to keep themselves covered in some sort of appropriate way. 11:01 Wes: Eidos as an E, I, D, O, S, the ancient Greek word for form 11:05 Erin: or A I, D, O, s. Okay. Eidos. Eidos. I'm not sure how to say it. 11:10 Wes: What is that? What is that from? 11:12 Erin: Yeah, she just describes it as shamefastness. That is the definition she gives. And this is Carson. Aidos is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact. Instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them. 11:30 Wes: Okay, so this is. This is a Greek goddess of modesty and shame. Yeah, so it looks like it is. It is some sort of minor goddess, but yeah, more personification. 11:40 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And she writes, a chaste wife, like Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, holds her veil up on either side of her face when confronting suitors, while Medea's decision to abandon chastity for Jason is indicated by holding her veil aside. So this use of the veil as an expression of this sense of shame or Reluctance or this idea of the boundary that had a huge influence on me. So at the same time that I'm trying to write about this thing which I feel sort of shame around or which is a painful subject for me, or which, you know, which I've historically wanted to cover up, I felt that Carson, with this concept of aidos and of the veil, was giving me a way in. 12:18 Wes: Yeah. So the veil. So there's quite a bit in here. Yeah. That says something about poetry. And one can think of poetic use of language as a kind of veil, which is a way to get at some of these things which might otherwise be too. I don't know, quote, unquote, naked, too raw to talk about. So I'm just. I'm thinking of a line from your prose poem, the Mask versus the Veil, where you end with, the mask is a narrative, the veil is a lyric. And it sounded like the mask of something. Right. It's more rigid and opaque and potentially a false self. But the lyric, the poetic has to. Has to let something through. Maybe. 13:02 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. It's the idea that you may. What do I say here? To see behind the mask is an unexpected privilege. But the veil, by its nature, creates a need for revelation. While one might wonder what is beneath the mask, one must wonder what is beneath the veil. I think that that's the. That's the tension I'm interested in in the book is the idea that the. The veil is about this desire to hide, but it's also a kind of inherent teasing. It's hiding. It could be hiding in a sort of flirtatious way or in a way which really wants to be found. And that line I thought was so interesting. The more that I looked at veils, images of veils in. On film and in art, the more I saw quite clearly that. That tension being expressed between a woman being strong and putting on this veil to try to gird herself in the face of some obstacle, but also wanting to unveil or wanting to be seen for who she really was. Wanting to have someone look behind the veil, as it were. 14:05 Wes: It seemed like that could go for seduction or love, but also for religion. You have a prose poem about taking the veil as a. Having something to do with becoming the bride of Christ, but also something that suggests, quote, possibilities that may yet lie dormant in her. The promise of a vocation, a calling, a purpose. So the desire to be discovered in various different ways, including in one's aspiration. I think there's quite a bit in here about the concept of aspiration. 14:38 Erin: Thinking, too, about the blood disorder and what happened during that time. And having to revisit that through the essay, I think gave me. It was like excavating my past somehow gave me an insight into different parts of myself that I hadn't realized were there or had forgotten. 14:53 Wes: Yeah, I love that image of you as a bride for Halloween. How old are you in this? 15:00 Erin: I think it's five. 15:02 Wes: It included a veil that looked like a Vegas showgirl's loincloth. But I was just going to say, yeah. This picture of you in a veil, in this kind of funny way as a child, stands in some contrast to various pictures of your great grandmother and your grandmother and your mother in a veil, where there's sort of a different sentiment, really, that comes across in each of those. I don't know if I'm saying anything there that you can. You can respond to. I just. But I enjoyed this series of different snapshots or your descriptions of pictures of people in wedding veils. I sort of. I think the core articulation of the theme of the book comes on page 31, where there's two prose poems to veil and then to a Veil. Did you want to read those? 15:54 Erin: Sure. To veil, to say no. To cover the body. To hide the body. To prevent the gaze of the other. To forbid the gaze of the other. To guard the body as precious. To mark oneself as holy. To gather unto oneself, to store up one's resources. To set a boundary, to construct a barrier for the body. To sketch an outline of the body. To provide a negative image of my body. To hint at what lies beneath by limning the body's shape. To suggest, to tease, to torture, by withholding the body. To mark a potential availability, to imply a future unveiling. To signify yes by saying no. To avail. To say yes. To see a value, to explore a possibility. To take the opportunity to make use of, to respond to generosity, to accept an overture, to help oneself, to satisfy oneself. To have one's fill, to consume, to gorge oneself, to press an advantage, to exploit, to strong arm, to throw one's weight around. To take what is there for the taking. To pillage, to breach, to cross the barrier erected by another, to unveil, to destroy, to force a retreat to. To colonize, to procure another's. No. 17:24 Wes: It's interesting you name the book avail, but I think this is the one section that is explicitly about veiling versus availing. And the word veil, I think, only occurs five times. I actually counted the word veil. You know, this Book better than veiling is being veiled. And I was interested in the fact too. You know, you got me interested in the etymology of a veil or the usage of a veil because we generally today say avail oneself of. Right. And so veiling invites that, but also disinvites it, as you put it, to procure another's. No, but the original, you know, the. The use of the avail that is now archaic. I think it was just to. To benefit or assist. Right. So if you availed someone, you assisted them, and if something was availing, it was advantageous. And then. Right, and so the word available is related. Right. So I found it interesting that the sort of altruistic, original meaning of the word, when used reflexively became reversed into something that is potentially exploitative. Right. Or something that is potentially selfish. You avail oneself, or maybe you help yourself instead of helping someone, you help yourself to something. And I did that. And, you know, it got me looking into, well, how and why did that transition take place? So I'm pointing to that just because I think, yeah, the explicit use of this word veil kind of falls out and it's implicit everywhere. 18:55 Erin: Just as veiling also has a veiling in it where there's this desire for revelation. It's a sort of theatrical covering. Right. And so seems to demand that one at least be interested in whatever one is covering. And that kind of attention being drawn to the covered thing is exactly what I was wrestling with in choosing to disclose this personal story as well. 19:18 Wes: Ange Mlinko connects this archaic meaning of the veil to descending and then descending into the underworld. But in this case, the underworld into which you descend is full of figures like Rita Hayworth. Much of this honors various, what I think are idols of yours from movies. I think 19:42 Erin: that's right. 19:43 Wes: That's correct to say, then, Rita Hayworth, I think she's the most often mentioned. She's mentioned in at least four or five places. 19:53 Erin: She's the sort of patron movie star of the book. 19:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah. What is that about? 19:57 Erin: In the book? It starts in Covergirl. Should I read CoverGirl? It was a hospital season, a grainy black and white reel. Exam rooms, waiting rooms, offices, hallways, my northwest facing bedroom, my closed eyes until the day you took me to the movies a Friday morning and I, the only child in a throng of gray why aren't you in school? Sat by you holding tightly to your arm and watched the whole bright world come roaring in alive so red, so red I sighed in the ice cream parlor afterward over her glorious technicolor hair, her Lips, her piked fingernails as we savored our usuals, pistachio yours and black raspberry mine at our blue window booth. While outside the pumpkin smiled back at me and the sunburnt leaves died floridly on the vine. 20:52 Wes: That's great. 20:53 Erin: That's the first thing I think I ever wrote about my illness, actually. I saw her on the big screen and this. They used to run these. They would actually bus seniors in for these Friday morning, you know, like 11am movies. And they would even give out little free mini popcorns. I think it was like $2 or maybe even a dollar to watch these movies that they got prints of. Most of them were really not good. But the first one that I ever saw was CoverGirl and on the big screen, Rita Hayworth with that red hair in Technicolor, which is. Which is more than color. You know, Technicolor is just fantastically vibrant. 21:29 Wes: And, yeah, there's an ongoing contrast in your book between the color red and the color white. And where I think whiteness is associated with pallor and nakedness and maybe the literal truth. And red gets associated with both vitality and being veiled. So, for instance, the redness of the cheek that you might have pinched to give it more vitality or, you know, lipstick being applied or makeup, something like that. And it starts in the very. I think it starts with the very first poem of the book called Snow. I don't know if you wanted to read that as well. I don't. Yeah, just stop me if I'm pushing you to read too many things, but, yeah, go ahead. 22:15 Erin: Snow. It drifts and it drifts as the finished VHS respools, its tinsel white bands flurrying across the glossy hilltop of the TV screen. A modern weather like the swirl of asbestos in Dorothy Gale's hair. The ivory soap flakes strewn over Bedford Falls, the sprayable foam it mocks, the snap pop of a stand of trees buckling under a blanket or a bucket's ice shell cracking above the heat of the tape's firelog. Its storm will kick up when I replay the movie. A grocery aisle now edged with blizzards. Anklets coated in hoarfrost. Summers forecasting a pixelated ice Age. Stanwyck snowing tears even as she smiles. And me rewinding the melting tape to the point of dissolution, whiting out each scene with a love that, like all love, distorts its object, glazes it with ice, swallows it like a mailbox in a mounting heap until the tape stops and only my Face bloodless winters, the blank screen. 23:24 Wes: And I can't help but as I was reading this partly because of what I know from you, but it's also there, just in context, provided by the book. Even when you're not mentioning your grandfather explicitly in his role in this, you see him kind of hovering behind the poem. So he's the one who, while you were sick, was giving you these VHS tapes and fostering your love of classic movies and giving you kind of a transfusion, so to speak. Something vital at a time when you were dealing with a loss of vitality. 23:59 Erin: I love that. Yeah. These films were like portals to a kind of glamour or, you know, what I imagined back when I was a kid as a kind of grown up world of sophistication and intrigue and interesting problems and beautiful faces and interesting people. So, yeah, and he supplied. He was my dealer, so. But I love. I love the idea that he was giving me these transfusions of this. This filmic vitality. Yeah. 24:27 Wes: Well, as I told you before we started recording, I did, you know, like a complete, like, thematic concordance of your book. Various themes, your illness, your mother's illness, your grandfather and I. And I. And also, as you also know, I like to find arcs and things. So I really thought I saw a progression in each sort of line. There's a lot in here about the death of your grandfather, but I think emotionally it sort of climaxes with the very last poem about him called March 27, where there's this very poignant image of him mourning for you, so to speak, because you're playing Evita and you're being paraded around in that glass casket. 25:08 Erin: Yeah. 25:08 Wes: And it made him tearful. So there's a beautiful juxtaposition of that and you confronting his death. And that includes scenes where you're seeing him in his coffin at the wake. 25:19 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. You're noticing things in the structure that I had forgotten. It's funny because this book has been done now for over a year, so it's actually, you know, I had to prepare for this podcast myself by going back and rereading the book, but you're reminding me of some choices that I agonized over, so I'm glad they are. They're coming across. 25:40 Wes: Yeah. So speaking of thematic arcs, is that even a thing? So one of my favorite poems was Pacific Palisades, and I see that as sort of another climactic moment that sort of is a culmination of different thematic concerns. Were you surprised by the way that I chose that one? 26:00 Erin: No. 26:01 Wes: Yeah. Why? 26:02 Erin: No, we share this in our Die Hard episode. We got into trouble for this, but we share an Eastern sensibility. No. 26:14 Wes: Well, I was going to ask you about this because the poem begins with this wonderful first line, and I'll have you read the whole thing in a moment. But it's California. We've reached the end of taste. And I assumed you meant the end as in the telos of taste, the highest manifest of taste, not the. But we'll talk about what that word N means, because maybe you can read it as being polysemous. I wish people had listened to our Die Hard episode that way. Talk about taking things literally. Someone made a negative comment about subtext predicated on the idea that we are slagging off California and we were merely relating a stereotype. 26:53 Erin: Well, luckily, you know, luckily all my Californian friends, when I read this out loud, were like, that's our favorite one. You know, I did a reading where there were a bunch of Californians there and they were laughing so hard at that. And the, you know, saw it for being the sort of tongue in cheek statement that it was, but we managed 27:11 Wes: to wake the one sleeping dragon. And that is a California. 27:14 Erin: Chill out, man. 27:15 Wes: California. Oh, so seriously, what's the point of being Californian if you take it. 27:21 Erin: Exactly. Sorry, Exactly. 27:23 Wes: Am I getting us in trouble again? Let's. Yeah. Do you want to read Pacific Palisades? 27:29 Erin: And sure, it's California. We've reached the end of taste. We're strolling on the Getty Villas bluff, Its merit weighed against the megalithic waste of historic reproduction. What's Egyptian about the Egyptian revival? Parisian in the Vegas strips Arc de Triomphe A supersized riff on the Villa dei Papiri the original at least was blown to ash. We console ourselves beneath a marquee hawking lattes With a lobby built to recall an excavation. Its galleries house the hall of the thinking man's robber baron. A cache of Heracleses, kouroi, hydrias A replica of a Pompeii fountain mapped with west coast shells. The coinage of Illyria Cycladic figures, the alleged Mazarin Venus gardens with herbs of ancient Roman genus A satyr reclining as in a Kardashian snap Visitors pose so thickly in the peristyles we struggle to escape another's selfie still in an atrium frisbeed with sundials I admit equal beguilement by counterfeit and bonafide alike. Who's to say what's legit? A Roman Original is a Greek man's copy called back from antiquity to the traffic rumbling below, where mention of Inceville's studio passes for ancient history, its epics, civilization widely deemed low brow, and the Italian whose hero nosed the prow of a gondola down Venice Beaches rills or further up where once lived Brecht, Adorno, Schonberg and the Magic man, all told, the Weimar by the sea in glass decked houses out of David Hockney we list for klempt. Out of the villa's gate, the novelist, when not apprising Hesse of his wanton lawn, the Eden in which he'd torment Leverkühn, partied with Cagney, Jack Warner, Berlin and handed Tassen to a young Sontag, soon to take the devil's bargain for her own art. We quote her missive on illusion that no part of any work is new, that all is reproduction. Across the highway, we sink through coastal sage to watch the sunset on the proper shore against outcrops dated to the Miocene age. Like good Easterners, we shield our eyes from the vulgarity of pleasure, the paradise unearned, the honest falsehood, the easily adored. 29:56 Wes: Yeah, I like the fact that we start out in a museum of sorts and then we, at some point we end up partying with famous people. This is not the only typical California. That's right, it's California. We've reached the end of taste. I love that line because I just think of manifest destiny, right, and going west and then ending up on that shore, as well as the idea perhaps, that it's the endpoint of some logical development, for better or for worse. So something like a telos, but also perhaps tastelessness. Yeah. So do you want to piss off some Californians? 30:35 Erin: No, I'm afraid. I'm afraid to put my foot in it. Yeah. There's a falseness, of course. I mean, there are plenty of qualities about California which are really just qualities about America that you could see really clearly and all very wonderful. Exactly. No, it's, you know, there's a falseness to it. It's constructed as all of America is sort of constructed. And then you also have this, you know, it's built on this, people playing make believe, you know, I mean, specifically la. Obviously there are other, other parts of California which are quite different, but, you know, and I love that about California, you know, but the, the, you know, you can't love movies as I do and hate California. 31:20 Wes: Right. 31:21 Erin: But there's a, you know, there's a guilt for me. It's not an accident. And I think this is something that's coming out in the. The next manuscript that I'm working on that, you know, a lot of my favorite actresses are actually people who had rather fraught relationships with California and who were, in fact, New Englanders, like Bette Davis, like Katharine Hepb. And so, you know, there's a sort of sensibility clash, I think, involved in the relationship of those two particular actresses to that place, but also to a lot of people's experience of California or even just their experience of being an artist and of having this. Having to have a relationship to an audience or having to, you know, there are all kinds of things I think are implicated in that. 32:00 Wes: Having to please an audience and then the danger of selling out or the danger of becoming mere pop culture. Although pop culture can be wonderful as well. Is that the idea? 32:12 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think also. I don't know, being easy on yourself too, versus being hard on yourself. Right. I think that's. That's a little bit part of the subtext. Drunk at home. That's a little part of the subtext of the. Of the poem. And I'm very afraid of that. You know, I'm someone who's, you know, is probably secretly very concerned that I might just take it too easy one day and never, never, never do anything useful or interesting again. And so I have to constantly guard against that. And so places like California where everyone is just having a good time in theory, or where the weather. Weather is always nice, I'm just distrustful of. And I think it's hard. I think it's hard to create good work in Hollywood for lots of reasons, you know, not necessarily having to do with the climate or anything uniquely about. About California, but just. Yeah, the populism, the everything. So, yeah, so you have this. This. This Getty Villa, you know, this amazing place which has gorgeous collection of. Of ancient statues and just everything. And put in this, you know, kind of fake villa to make it look as though this was the Romans. You know, this is just part of their empire that somebody just stumbled across on the California coast. So, you know, the real, real things mixed with fake and then something being also real. And the fakeness too. 33:34 Wes: Yeah. It strikes me that there are better and worse versions of fakeness. Right. So obviously the fakeness of art is supposed to be the highest form of fakeness, as in. Right. Fictional narrative or poetry. The creation of illusions of sorts. The kind of thing that Plato didn't like because they were not the truth with a capital T, but on a More positive interpretation, trying to get at, like, larger truths. Right. So the emotional truths, thematic truths, you could tell a fictional narrative that says something true. And in that sense, the narrative becomes the veil, I suppose, of the thing that is being gestured at. And it can only be. It becomes. Right, trite or too simplistic, if you try any other approach. Right. So if you write a philosophical monograph on it, you lose a lot. It gets too abstract. We need appearance, we need representation, as falsifying as that might be. But in this case, it seems like there's always the danger that the level of appearance, that there's something, if it's not done right, that there could be something truly and tastelessly false about that. You're always on the edge of either making falsification serve the truth or having it to collapse into something more sinister, it seems. So I thought maybe. Yeah, maybe some of this is also about the anxiety of influence. Because it's right. You reference the Sontag. It's all reproduction. And all we can do is to take influence and to take everything that we've taken in, artistic products and somehow metabolize that. And then either we come out with something that's original or something that's derivative, but maybe there's not that much in between those two. 35:26 Erin: I think you're leading me into Phoenicians. Am I wrong about that? 35:29 Wes: I wasn't conscious of thinking about that, but I'm sure the wiser, unconscious part of me was doing that. Shall we? Yeah, let's do that. But. Yeah. Did I. Am I getting that right? As far as what you said, yeah. 35:43 Erin: I mean, okay. You know, you even worked in a veil there. I got a. Could have you follow me around and do my. 35:52 Wes: I could be your internal narrator if you want. 35:54 Erin: There you go. 35:56 Wes: Relate everything. Any veil, any theme you want. Go ahead. 36:00 Erin: Right, here's the Phoenicians, transplants both like the palm trees that lend the landscape a tropical legibility. They live in an invented place, precarious as language. Squat, blank, rectangular, their house admits nothing, forms a single brick in a wall just one brick tall. All the neighbors seem to make a living in encryption. Their little boy can't learn the word for cloud but knows camel cactus de doo, his name for the bird that hovers over the dryscaping looking for a place to land. I walk him by the canal that runs its concrete vein through Scottsdale, feeds the pool at the Arizona Biltmore where once in a deck chair, Irving Berlin dreamt up white Christmas over a tequila sunrise, fighting the dual oppressions of happiness and heat who wouldn't long for snow, for history, for an end to the inveterate blinking of the neon signs that flash their native terms dominoes and just beneath it, guns. But at dusk the sky runs Tyrian purple and the saguaros on the hills throw their inscrutable Alphabet shadows across serifs of agave. A living document, vigorous and prickly. 37:22 Wes: Yeah, So I love dominoes and guns. Frankly, 37:28 Erin: you'll be right at home in Phoenix. 37:31 Wes: It's a fan of the Phoenicians. Now, let's see. One of the things I loved about this poem and the reason why singled it out was just this final stanza. Inscrutable Alphabet shadows across serifs of agave. And then the other thing, you know, again, we get to party with a famous artist. We. We start out, we're in Arizona in the desert, and then all of a sudden, he's dreaming of something else. There's at least a te. I guess I'm just focusing on the drink. But it's so. I saw this. You know, you're by the canal one moment, and the next moment it's something far less mundane and more fabulous. And it sounds like it's a way of. To talk about Berlin dreaming up longing for a white Christmas in contrast to the oppressions of heat is a way of talking about your longing for that in this context. Or you're longing for something else. But. Yeah. What is this poem about? Is that a legitimate poetry interview question? What is this poem about? 38:38 Erin: No, that's. I think you're totally right. These friends have since moved out of Phoenix. But I'd gone a couple times down to Phoenix to see them and their young son. And. I don't know. I went to Phoenix and I just. I never had a bad time there. And I tried to think of what it was that was making me have such a good time. 38:58 Wes: It's the dry heat. 38:58 Erin: They say it's the dry heat. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and there's. Of course, we could easily make an Arrested Development joke here where you show up in Phoenix and burn your hand on the car door. But anyway, I'd rather be. 39:13 Wes: What is it? I'd rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona. 39:19 Erin: Yeah. And, you know, these are just, you know, this one in Pacific Palisades, just about living in the west and trying to find. Trying to trace back, you know, like the vein, you know, trying to trace things back to some kind of source so that I can understand where these places are coming from. What's going on here? You know, what is this place really about? And when you have a place like Phoenix, which is a tertiary settlement, which is an entirely constructed place, I mean, it's really not habitable. And they've just given it these palm trees to try to make it look like a resort place. These palm trees are not native to the place. And again, thinking, well, none of us is native to this country unless we are Native Americans. None of us is native to this country. You know, what is this? What is this about? What's real about this? What is this trying to show me? Or what can this teach me? And then trying to find something good in it and something real. If I think it's unreal, how is it real? You know, this sort of self argument, I mean, that's just a larger insight into how I write poems, which is if I'm criticizing something, that's usually a good germ of a poem. Anger is usually a good. Anger is too strong of a word for something like this. Right. But some sort of irritation or some sort of annoyance maybe is usually a good engine for a poem because it's active and it makes you. Pushes you into language to say, why am I feeling this way? What do I want to articulate? And then trying to talk oneself out of it and saying, okay, what's the opposite of this? How can I have a sort of dialogue with myself here? And then, of course, in a poem like this, it's also sort of turning that back on language itself and thinking about language itself and how that's working. 40:53 Wes: Yeah. It begins with this idea of inscrutability. Right. So all the neighbors seem to make a living in encryption. But the house sounds like that as well. Right. Blank and rectangular. And despite the tropical legibility. Right. Despite these palm trees that are supposed to make the landscape somehow readable or legible. So there's that setup. It's not. It makes it sound intriguing. And then we get the walk by the canal, and then we get you associating to longing for something else, which is where I stopped in my characterization. I didn't really do full justice to the structure of the poem because there's a. Right, you get. You get to a negative characterization of dominoes and guns. But it ends with an attempt to explain what is so attractive about the place. So the sky running Tyrian purple, the cacti on the hills throwing their Alphabet shadows. But it's still inscrutable at the end. But there's something. There's a kind of vitality to it, despite the Fact that you're in the desert, it seems the prickliness, the vigorousness. 42:09 Erin: That's right, yeah. Something real here. 42:11 Wes: After all, there's vitality. And I just thought, yeah, that, that is something that comes up quite a bit. Right, so the. And something that you associate with blood. Right. And the prickly cacti, I think we can imagine pricking ourselves on them and bleeding, but it being something that is vitality inducing. And that, that reminds me of your Salome. So this is page 58. So it reminded me of Salome and then Rita. Herwit, Rita Hayworth. So yeah, I love this line. Veiling and a veiling are collapsed. John the Baptist is beheaded by a stripper. So another point that one might argue is a climactic moment in the book where things really come together. And then you get Rita Hayworth, a flame with vitality, dancing with vigor, the dance of the seven veils, flaunting her vitality. And I take a bit of the aspiration for you to flaunt your vitality. So did you want to say something about that? There's a bit of a, there's a bit of an edge to this form of vitality though, since John the Baptist does get beheaded. 43:22 Erin: Yeah, that's right, yeah. And she flaunted in mine too. You know, there's something a little bit flaunted in my face too, I should say. 43:27 Wes: Oh, right, yeah. 43:28 Erin: I mean there's the desire for this, but there's the. You know, maybe what I am admiring in Phoenix is like it's self belief, you know, that's maybe the thing that the speaker has trouble accessing. See now I'm, now I'm saying the speaker of course separated from myself so that I have none of this is plausible deniability. Exactly right. This is me in air quotes. No, but I mean, you know, of course there's a bit of posing that goes on. So it's hard to. Or even just crystallizing something in some sort of definitive statement. There's always going to be a little bit of, you know, the real person wants to hedge a little bit and say, well, not exactly that. Right. The question of self confidence or self belief or the desire to escape oneself is certainly a problem that the speaker eye whatever, you know, has and when confronted with someone in the, in the sort of full force vigor of their, their personality, even if it's prickly or whatever, that can sometimes be shocking or upsetting or it could feel like a taunt or even an attack. So this girl is sometimes maybe a little bit Upset with Rita Hayworth. Maybe a little bit upset over this whole situation and a little sad and maybe a little self pitying too. Hopefully not too much. 44:45 Wes: You mentioned aspiration here, I think, and the connection to vitality, as I mentioned. I thought that comes up quite a bit in this book. And I also thought the Phoenicians. I kind of put the Phoenicians under that category as well. Several categories. Because something about associating to Berlin I thought was fit into this kind of category of aspiration. But I think my favorite reference to this is in the Awful truth on page 27. One of many great lines and ideas in here about shaking life by the martini. So what I wouldn't give for her glinty self confidence. Not the false courage I summoned to sing when I become a chanteuse version of myself. A Persona borrowed from the record shelf of a dusty basement in Connecticut to shake life by the martini. But to stay self possessed, to star in the movie of myself instead of playing second lead and so on. Sort of like the. I was going to call it a credo, but I. Maybe that's going a bit too far. 45:45 Erin: That's right. I think you're on to something there. 45:51 Wes: Yes. 45:52 Erin: You know, it's hard to love these movies so much and have them all be full of confident women when you're just a normal woman. 46:02 Wes: Yeah, but something to aspire to. What's your favorite poem in here? 46:06 Erin: You know, you mentioned a few that I really like. I think Pacific Palisades is one of my favorites. I think Black Eyed Susie's really captures a moment in my life. I like the Phoenicians. 46:17 Wes: Frances Gumm, another line I love. She believed in love poems. The Kennedys and the Efficacy of Tears. I hope this isn't vulgar, just me pulling out my favorite bits. 46:26 Erin: No, no. That's really nice of you. Yeah. That's poor Judy. Yeah, she's my favorite. And she gets. I was a little sad that she got a little bit of a short shrift in this book, so I was happy that people liked Frances Gumm. But. Yeah, and Oxford, another one you liked. You liked a lot of my favorites, actually. 46:44 Wes: Your hair grew to Pre Raphaelite proportions. 46:47 Erin: Yes. You know this is true. 46:51 Wes: Yeah, I do, I do. It's funny because. Yeah, I've seen your hair like that. I think maybe my favorite line, though is in the Gold of Naples. Things kept reminding me of other things. I just love that as a beginning to a poem and then ending with the idea that resemblances are just the shadows of differences and I thought, has anyone ever said that? Just seems like the kind of thing that someone should have already said. And I googled it and no one has. No one has ever said that resemblances are just the shadows of differences. Yeah. 47:19 Erin: Really? I thought I was pulling that from something. I mean, in the. In the poem it suggests that it was something someone said. 47:26 Wes: And as a someone in the movie. 47:30 Erin: No, just a saying. I just thought it was a saying. Something like that. 47:33 Wes: Well, maybe in some other form it's been been said, but. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't heard it. 47:39 Erin: I'm glad I'm, you know, more original than I thought in this book about sort of not being original or not needing to be original. 47:49 Wes: Just remember, originality is just a shadow of. 47:53 Erin: That's right. Of unoriginality. 47:55 Wes: Yeah. Of borrowing, of stealing. 48:00 Erin: Should I end by reading the Gold of Naples and. Sure, then we'll sign off. All right. This is the last poem in the book. So people are, you know. But there are other things in here. I promise. We haven't quite, quite covered it all. The gold of Naples. Things kept reminding me of other things. The old ladies in the street were my aunts. A counterman at Cafe Mexico was Toto in a soda fountain hat. The rum babas were trumpet mutes. My hanging mocha pots were little men with barrel of monkeys arms. This garden looked like Barcelona. That piazza was a picture of a picture of Rome. Vesuvius was a Crawford eyebrow arched over the bay. My pizza oven of an apartment was. It really was the apartment in the Gold of Naples. And I was me or some baked and dusky version of myself. And I was alone and half delirious and overweight. An Aussie tourist by a bookstall turned to me and said, those Japanese experts say this place will blow at any moment. If you thought Pompeii was trouble, I did. Just wait. From my roof I watched the sunset through a bottle of Strega. And it was a John Martin painting. One of those camp apocalyptic bugaboos. Now, how does the saying go? Resemblances are just the shadows of differences. The end of my world is the beginning of yours. 49:23 Wes: I was hoping you were going to do the Aussie tourist in an accent. 49:29 Erin: Those Japanese. No, I can't do it. 49:31 Wes: I want to hear it. 49:32 Erin: I can't. 49:33 Wes: No, no, you can't do an Aussie accent. 49:36 Erin: I can, but I don't wanna. It would be a hate crime if 49:39 Wes: I did just say shrimp on the bar. 49:43 Erin: I'll say it off recording. 49:46 Wes: So you're associating You're. The things you're being reminded of are scenes are from a movie called the Golden Naples. Right. That's what I take this to be. 49:56 Erin: Yeah, some of it. Yeah. I was really staying in this apartment that was in this movie. Sophia Loren is in this movie. And Naples is a place that my family's from there. It's very. You know, it was an uncanny experience for me to walk around in Naples and to. Not really, you know, Naples isn't in the imagination the way that a lot of Italian cities are in American imaginations. You know, like, we could sort of see. We think of Rome, we could see the Colosseum and things like that. Naples is a very. It can be a very rough place. It's corrupt, it's. You know, but it's also extremely vital. It's a very vital place. It's very associated for me, of course, with blood, because I'm from there and with blood of Saint Januarius and with all of these people that walk around that look exactly like your family members, in my case, they look really. I kept. I just kept thinking that I was seeing people that I knew from my own family, and a couple times they were people I knew. So there was something extra uncanny about that because, of course, you know, I was partially there to visit family and to go to ancestral houses and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don't know, I just. It was. It was trippy. It was a trippy experience. That sense of familiarity and strangeness coming together was, I think, what I was after here. 51:15 Wes: They really thought Vesuvius was going to blow again. 51:18 Erin: Yes, it will. It will blow again. And that's the other thing, is that you're there, and at the time, I think it was fresh in people's minds. I don't know if there was some update or if some. If they had taken fresh readings on Vesuvius or something like that, but people were talking about it. People on the streets were talking about it in Italian and Napolitan, and it was like, I just got in this place and it's there. I mean, have you been to Naples? 51:45 Wes: Uh, no. Maybe Pass through, but. 51:47 Erin: Yeah, no, I had a little rooftop area that I would go up to, you know, just in the poem, and. And you look and there's Vesuvius. You know, you can't escape it. And you just think to yourself, why is everybody here? Why am I here? I don't know how many millions of people in total live in the impact zone of Vesuvius were it to erupt again, It Would be just massive catastrophic event. Started to really freak me out a little bit. The imposing. You go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it's very real, and it's there and it's smoking. Climbed up to the top, and it's just incredible. 52:25 Wes: So when you say the end of my world is the beginning of yours, who is the you and the yours at the end? 52:31 Erin: I think it's the reader. I think it's the reader. I'm writing to people. I think my background is a singer and a performer is. I think I'm conscious of responsibility to an audience to offer something to them. And so here I think I. You know, I wanted to end with a poem that directly gave a nod. 52:52 Wes: So resemblances of the shadows of differences, you know, reminds me of Plato. Resemblances are shadows of the. You know, things in themselves, the real. But here the difference seems to be the difference between. Between poetic imaginary world and then the reader's real world. And so the. The reader can take some of this and take it into the real world and into vitality. Is that the idea, or. 53:19 Erin: I think that's right, yeah. You know, the same thing that we were talking about with Pacific Palisades. What is really real and what isn't. What is more real? The movie that took place in this apartment or whatever took place while I was living there. You know, they're sort of both equally real and equally invisible, formed by each other. So that the representation becomes as real a part of one's experience. In the same way that I think that I'm experiencing films or artworks. In the book, you can have these formative experiences around your confrontation with the artwork. Such that, you know, a movie or a book read, you know, at an important time in your life becomes as much a part of what was happening to you at that time as whatever was really going on in your life, in your daily life. So there's some sort of collapse. I hope that happens at the end. Where these two things become so fused together that there's no difference that, you know, like. Like veiling and availing. You know, they're sort of two sides of the same coin. And that ultimately is like, maybe the ideal encounter with art. 54:22 Wes: Well, unfortunately, we're. We've reached the end. I want to say there is a lot more in here about. Right. So everything from love and singing and acting and sleep and the whole. The whole concept of metaphor to great descriptions of the body. It's a really great description of that. You do the veins and the heart and relating that to a veil. So I highly recommend this to listeners, and I guess it's time for us to borrow a phrase of yours. Slip behind the curtain like a metaphor. 54:58 Erin: Thank you so much, Wes. It's so kind of you. 55:01 Wes: Thank you. 55:04 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: patreon.com subtextpodcast. 0:31 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. We just got done with an extended conversation about Nurse Ratched's personality. And I think I'll start by just adding one more thing about the glass, which I thought of, but I forgot to say, there's a kind of glassy eyed look, I think, to Nurse Ratched's. 0:50 Erin: Oh, that's good. 0:51 Wes: Yeah, the way she looks at things. And it occurred to me that some of the crowd that I roll with, the psychoanalytic crowd, would characterize her as psychotic, as kind of twisted at the point of psychotic being kind of quite out of touch with reality, or at least out of touch with emotional reality, which that glassy eyedness kind of conveys. And it occurred to me that, that, yeah, that little tiny office that she's in with the glass, sliding glass window further reflected that orientation to reality. And again, the kind of thing where she can watch from her perch while the chaos she's creating, a projective identification unfolds around her. And then she can do what she needs with that psychologically. And it's part of what helps keep her calm. That's her medication. The medication is going through the window both ways. She's handing it out, she's taking it in. Yeah. 1:43 Erin: Well, I just wanted to comment on that in relation to this Christ parallel with McMurphy, because really it's a sort of dueling religion binary between the two of them because she also, that's sort of her rectory, if you will. The medication line. I can't not think of a communion line, especially when one of the patients opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue to receive the pill on the tongue. And also with this idea which I'm, you know, I keep sort of getting around it because I'm not quite sure ultimately what big picture to draw from it, but her catering to the weaker or the weakest and the most helpless in the Name of a kind of benevolence which seems like a Christian idea. Whereas McMurphy is about say the more militant half or the more active or engaged or proselytizing even part of Christianity, if there's a binary distinction to be made there. You know, it occurs to me that in trying to get Chief to respond to him and come out of a shell or, you know, he makes the. He tries to talk to Chief in his own language, which is a bit, a bit crass, a bit much, right. And then when he's trying to teach him basketball, he says it's an old Indian game called put the ball in the hole or something like that. And, and it occurs to me that that too is, is a. One of the classic methods of the conversion of, you know, non Western, say groups to Christianity when you're sending out missionaries is to put the Christian story or elements of Christian themes in terms of the local culture, that particular culture's terminology. So there's something in his extremely indelicate, granted and sort of brutish way, which is an attempt to be a missionary to reach this person on their level in terms that they will understand, to familiarize something, to make something less foreign to the audience with which you were trying to engage. There are a lot of elements. Of course, I didn't read anything about any secondary literature, so I don't know about McMurphy being a Christ figure. But of course the fishing trip was also something that. I could see it all. As soon as you said that, I started, you know, making the connection. But it occurred to me more that institutional religion was being critiqued on the Nurse Ratched side because of the communion line and keeping everybody sort of dialed docile. And you know, supposedly these are what, just sedatives to keep everybody from getting too rowdy. 4:17 Wes: They're probably antipsychotics, which are highly sedating in general. That's part of how they work. But teach a nut to fish, right, and set free, how would that saying go? But so let's say a little bit about what makes him Christ. Like, although again, I think he's more of a trickster. Satyr. 4:40 Erin: Oh, the Last Supper and the Resurrection, when they give him ect doesn't really work the second time. 4:49 Wes: And he is kind of betrayed by Billy. Billy could be Judas or maybe a combination of Judas and Peter. But I think the most self sacrificing moments involve. Well, there's two at the end, right? He's gonna, he's about to escape. He's given the men the big Party. Candy and Rose are waiting outside and he's got the window open and he's ready to escape. And then Billy is upset so he decides he's going to give Billy this sexual experience with Candy. And then at that point he, you know, he sets that up and then he sits down and you see him go into a state of reverie. And it's hard to say, you know, what is that state of reverie about? That's the calmest we've ever, I think we ever see him in the movie, the most peaceful. And he seems to be fantasizing either about his freedom or either what he's, you know, maybe what he's done for Billy. But that leads to him passing out and not escaping. Then he has a chance to escape again. The next morning he knocks out an orderly, gets the window open again. But then we hear Billy scream or no, someone scream. Nurse Pilbow screams because she finds Billy. And then he's going to have to go see what happened and strangle Nurse Ratched because that's what Jesus would do, obviously. What would Jesus do? Anyway, so the two self sacrificing moments are the two times he gives up escaping and then he's doing a lot of things that are helpful and therapeutic in the sense he's getting people out of their shells. The motive though, the conscious motive is, seems to be virtually entirely selfish and being subversive. Right. So why does he take the men fishing? He gets chief to help him get over the fence. He gets into the bus. I mean he could drive off and escape at that point he could go be with Candy without having any interference with his sexual shenanigans. Instead he's going to take all these guys on a field trip, steal the bus, take them. That's a lot of work. I don't know that I would have ever done that even if it were a legit version of that. It's a lot of work. He puts in all the work to take these guys on a field trip. But it's difficult to distinguish between the transgressive motive, the fuck you to the law and order motive, and the motive that involves being helpful to these guys. Or maybe it's just wanting to see some vitality in these men, these men who are closed off. But you can see the conflict directly, right? Because he's one minute he's showing the men how to fish, the next minute he's trying to go underneath with Candy. But then the boat ends up going in a circle and then someone's catching a fish and Then he's immediately helping them catch the fish. So he is a creature of impulse, jumping from one thing to another. But it's somehow that impulsiveness, that closer relationship to his own instinctual side, to his own sexual side, has a kind of altruistic effect, which it need not, as we know. Right. The guy is a criminal and is convicted of statutory rape and is in prison and, as I've speculated, is probably pretty strong sociopathic character traits. But it's this part of him that they lack, which he can give them and which delights him to give them. 8:12 Erin: Yeah, I think his. For me, his motives are a little bit murkier in that I think he's. I think he feels sorry for these guys quite early on. This is later explicitly said in the scene, actually after the fishing trip, I believe, where he learns that the men are voluntarily committed. And he says, you're no crazier than the average guy out on the street. Something like that. And that's when Nurse Ratched says, those are very challenging observations, which I would love to unpack. I have. I have no idea why that sticks out so much to me. But by this time, I believe they've already gone on the fishing trip. Cause this is rather. This is in the last third of the film. And this is going to be the scene where the fist fight happens when he punches through the window and then he gets ect. So I think that's after the fishing trip. But this idea of fishing is set up early in the film because in Dr. Spivey's office, there's the picture of Dr. Spivey with his first Chinook that he caught, holding the fish up proudly in the picture. And also the doctor in the present moment is expressing Chinooker. Okay. 9:18 Wes: Is that the way it is in the script? I have. 9:19 Erin: Okay. 9:21 Wes: He's like, you didn't weigh the chain. 9:24 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Right. You're supposed to be. Doctor, you're supposed to be in the business of weighing people's chains. Right. And yet they. He didn't think to weigh the chain, and it was extremely heavy. And again, we have the sense of the idea of strength and overcoming through physical strength, relating both to fighting and also overcoming one's sort of chains that hold one down or whatever the case may be. So all this stuff is sort of wrapped up in that moment. But I think he sees this doctor express pride in this fishing trip. And I think the seed is planted for him to later take these guys out so that they could have a little fun day of doing a guy Thing, you know, because all these guys really need to do is be guys. Come on, let's go fishing. Let's just get laid. And that occupational therapy is one which he seems to be consciously invoking. You know, we could make the connection back to, okay, we'll have these guys feel some pride in themselves if they go out and catch a fish. And he's encouraging them, you know, when Christopher Lloyd is putting the hook through the fish's eyes, which they're a little grossed out by, he eggs them on and is, you know, encourages them to keep going. And then they. They're sort of proud of themselves, too. And he says, you're not a lunatic now. You're a fisherman. So now I've given you a new occupation. I've given you a sense of purpose. You have a new noun to attach to yourself. I think his benevolence is about seeing that these men are not actually so badly off that they need to be committed and just wanting to give them a little bit of a push into something, some sort of liveliness or sense of fun, you know. And I think that McMurphy has this idea that if they just go out and have a good time, if they just walk, wet their whistle and watch the ball game, if they just get laid, then they will be better. And in fact, he's right every time. I mean, he. You know, he's right about the fishing trip. Billy loses his stutter because he gets laid. You know, he gets it back again immediately because Nurse Ratched emasculates him in a horrific scene. But that. That part of McMurphy's benevolence to me is actually a little. I mean, one doesn't look at it too closely, but that good part of him seems to me to be a little bit exaggerated. I think it's not accidental what he's doing. I think he takes an interest in these guys immediately and pities them and wants to see them feel confident. 11:50 Wes: Yeah, I still think there's a good helping of selfishness there and all that. And then we could think about his motives for wanting to manipulate these guys into doing these various things. Right. He's going to be doing something similar to Nurse Ratched. He's trying to get certain elements of his own psychological dynamics to unfold outside of him. So it might feel helpful without actually being helpful. But, yeah, the question. I mean, it's a good question. You ask whether he would consciously have any subjective desire to be helpful given the kind of character he is. He is otherwise. And then we can ask about the more realistic consequences of his actions. Because I want to say these men need structure. We had something in my house called day structure, which is actually very good for people. They had to be out of the house in the morning at 10am they had to have a job or some other way to spend 20 hours a week. Structure actually is good for people. I don't know about pacifying music or something like that, but this principle that he introduces, the more vital, instinctual sexual principle, is only good up to a point. This is the other thing that I see when people talk about dating. If they're not emotionally stable enough, I think, okay, right. They tell me a resident of my house would tell me started dating someone. I'm like, okay, here we go. This is going to be a hospital visit soon. So I just want to introduce the idea that this is. I mean, realistically, these men are having. They're shut down and they're having some vitality introduced into their life. And Ratched represents too much superego, too little instinct, too much repression. But we don't want them turning into McMurphys. And also, they couldn't handle it. Like the way you can't handle the truth. You can't handle being McMurphy. They couldn't handle would be destabilizing. So I don't think. I think the movie is. Or maybe I'm just viewing it this way, but I think the Nurse Ratched, as horrible as she is, the principle that she represents isn't all wrong. Exactly. Do you know what I mean? We don't see what can go wrong with the McMurphy principle, but it can be very, very destructive. 14:13 Erin: Yes, I agree with you that I personally think that Nurse Ratched is. I am sympathetic to her to a point. I think the problem that I'm finding in the film's message is I think that the film seems to be advancing the idea that these men are not sick, that Jack Nicholson is all too sane, and that we all need to take Jack Nicholson lessons like that is. And I think that's one of the reasons why I feel like this. The film lands. It's a little bit hard to believe at times, or it's a little bit hard to be on board with fully because it seems to be holding him up as this kind of paragon and therefore stepping on the wrong side of the misogyny divide. If this is really what it means to be a man, as the film seems to be saying, that's the impression that I got from the film, is that he's this life force that he is sane. You know, he knows more than the doctors. He, you know, can identify two cliches in a row. When the other doctor can't, he knows to weigh the chain. Yeah. And I think that's what the film is trying to say. Like look at this great guy who's wiser than the system. It's too bad that he then becomes a martyr to the system, a victim of the system. But he's inspired one person to make themselves free and perhaps the others. I know in the book that the other guys are all inspired by his example and they, you know, they're like Lazarus, they all get up and walk. 15:36 Wes: Yeah, I think to the extent that the film is saying that, that, yeah, that's not very realistic. Right. So it's one thing to say that we have to be in, we have to have more of the Dionysian principle. Right. But it's another to say that we simply go all the way to the Dionysian. So we want to offset that. And this is, by the way, this is one of Nietzsche's points. It's not that we get rid of the Apollonian or the scientific. We have a gay science, which is to say we have a Dionysian science. We have this fabulous fusion of the rational and the irrational. We get the optimum balance between the two. And the same thing I think with romantics like Wordsworth. Right. Didn't he explicitly say something similar? So it's not just to go to the opposite extreme. So yeah, hopefully I might be too charitably reading the movie, but I think we learn in the end that we don't just learn it in the end. We know that McMurphy is quite self destructive. That's how he ended up in prison and that's how he's getting into trouble with all these shenanigans. It's just that his self destructiveness can be helpful to others in this kind of accidental way, I think. And that becomes sacrifice for him. It becomes sacrifice because he ends up lobotomized and then ultimately dead because of it. And it's not that everyone needs this. Some people, they don't need more instinct, they need more superego and ego. They need to be repressed more. A lot of people could use a bit more repression. 17:11 Erin: That's right. 17:12 Wes: You're not just trying to liberate them from their and then let the ID run wild. But some people, yeah, they can use more life drive, they can use more vitality, they can use more instinct as long as it's Harnessed correctly and integrated with the rest of the personality in a certain way. So you could see someone like Chief. He's the one character who could really benefit from this. I think the rest of the guys actually do need to be in the institution. They're not going to do well on the outside. On a more charitable reading of this movie, it's only Chief who's really configured to fully benefit in the long term from someone like McMurphy. Assuming that he does. Assuming he doesn't end up back in the hospital the next day. But if McMurphy can be transformative in the long term for someone, I think this is a good. Maybe it's time to talk about the Chief, this particular character that he can be especially helpful to. 18:08 Erin: Yeah. And maybe, maybe my idea that Nicholson, that the film is single mindedly on Nicholson's side is actually because I'm reading that character's effect too generously. But it seems to me that Harding doesn't need to be there. Billy is hurt by being there in the same way that he's hurt by living with his mother. Billy needs to be kind of, you know, like a lot of this is. I'm actually. In other words, maybe I see Nicholson or maybe I see the film as positing that Nicholson is having this tremendously positive influence because I see his influence as positive. And this goes back to, I think this. You know, the idea that I had that Nurse Ratched is like this overbearing mom and Nicholson is like this licentious dad. And these guys have too much of this overbearing mom in their lives and they need the dad. They need the. The dad who's gonna throw them in the deep end of the pool. Dad who's gonna say, let's go out and do something dangerous. When they go out on the fishing trip, everything turns out fine. You know, I mean, they get in trouble. They don't like run through the streets tearing their clothes off or crying and getting hysterical or, you know, like, you know, they're capable of being out in society, it seems. 19:14 Wes: Well, but they're in a very specific circumstance. They're on a boat. Right. Which I think is important. This little, as Melville calls it, a boat is a very important little microcosm. And yeah, I don't think they would function very well for the most part in society. Just, just based on my. Okay, my experience. And I think it. So someone like Harding might be there to avoid killing his wife. In other words, they are looking for their impulses to be restrained. If they're There voluntarily. You ever watch police videos where someone. You probably don't, but I watch these sometimes because I find it psychologically fascinating where people work very, very hard to get arrested by police by being confrontational, when otherwise they're just going to be let go and they can't help themselves. It's almost like they want to be locked up. It's almost like they're. And they're really, really out of control. And it's almost like they want someone else to keep them in control. So this dynamic goes both ways. Where Nurse Ratched wants to be a controller, some people want to be in control because they're afraid of what their impulses will do, even if they're incorrect. It might not be that Harding would kill his wife if he stays home, but as an obsessional character, which he's a perfect representative of, he could well be afraid of that impulse. That's why there's this double play on life and wife. You know, I'm talking about my life, not just about my wife. It's also talking about her life. 20:52 Erin: I think this reminds me, I was just thinking of this little anecdote before where, when I was in college and taking an American lit class, we were reading Emerson, who I adore. And I came into class and everybody was talking about how Emerson is just this crazy egomaniac. And I found it really inspiring. And I remember the professor said, you know, that basically that most. He finds that most of his students who are healthy psychologically find Emerson to be too much, but depressed students find him. Exactly, exactly. But depressed students find him to be really inspiring and, like, need the jolt of self confidence that Emerson is dishing out in these essays. It's good for them. That's what they really need. And so I remember walking away from that, first of all thinking, am I depressed? And second of all, really understanding, I think, what he meant by that, because there's something about, like, you need to be in the position to be able to receive that message. And, you know, Emerson is talking to the person that he's trying to reach, you know, that that particular person, which was me in part, one man's satyr, one man's Dionysus, one man's trickster, evil antichrist, whatever he is, Topsy turvy Christ, is another man's motivational speaker, you know, and another man's positive paternal influence. And I think that what is frustrating about so many of these patients is that they. They seem to lack the ability to be decisive, to make a decision, to act, to do something. Your description of this need for control or perhaps need to be restrained as an angle, which I had not thought of. But I think more often than not, society or people's own inhibitions turns them into passive figures who need this jolt to get them out of that. And that seems to me to be something that. That principle is something that McMurphy is supplying to these men. You know, and I could be wrong, and I think, you know, maybe you're right about Harding, that he would attack his wife. But it seems to me that he need. That all these men need some. Just some chutzpah. They need some. Somebody to just give them a little jolt of confidence. Which is why, you know, sleeping with Candy works momentarily for Billy. At least in the film, it works. 23:19 Wes: Yeah, I'm having trouble figuring out which side you're coming down on here to the Ben. 23:23 Erin: Just though I'm distrustful of the way that the film is setting up Nicholson to be a kind of a hero, I also feel as though within the universe that the film is creating, he is the hero. And that these characters, in the way that they're constructed and the way that they're responding to Nicholson are kind of proving that they need. I'm sorry to be using his name interchangeably with McMurphy, but they're, you know, one in the same. I imagine they seem to need what he's giving them. Yeah, it may not be actually true in terms of the way that what they would need in real life, but in the fictional world, they seem to need what he is supplying. Now, I find that to be troubling and somewhat, in terms of this relationship with women, somewhat misogynistic. But I also think these men need a positive paternal influence to help them get a little decisiveness in their lives. At least in the film. That seems to be what they are lacking, these characters, and he's supplying it. But maybe this would be an opportunity for us to talk about why this works on Chief and what makes Chief. 24:33 Wes: Well, let me, before we do that. So I think it is probably part of the social. You know, there's a very kind of 1970s social commentary to the film, which is anti establishment, probably, and anti bureaucratic and maybe even, you know, not happy with the concept of mental health. You know, you have people these days who are right against all psychiatric medication or. Which is foolish, but they don't. It just reflects the fact that they don't really know what they're talking about. But it's a little unclear to me on where the film is on that but it's crafted well enough to be a bit. It's ambiguous enough to me where you could give it a more charitable reading and say, well, they do need that in a sense, but it's very context dependent. So they can have a fun time on a boat and they are having a nice party, but that's in the hospital. They're still locked in and there's still going to be staff the next morning on a real world basis. It's not a sustainable thing for them. They do need a different relationship to the instinctual and they are shut down in various ways. The solution is not just, hey, let's be more instinctual. Freud made a big point of this because I think people misunderstood them. He wrote a. I gotta remember the title here. Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness in which he complains a lot about the sexual mores of the time and the fact that there basically isn't even really any dating, right. And just people end up with each other and then they're very unhappy. But he also makes a point in that essay to say, yeah, just saying, don't be uptight and let's have free love and let instincts reign. That is not a good solution. To say that some people need this more Dionysian element introduced is, I think, absolutely true. But how it's integrated is key. And it's like a long term therapeutic process. It's not enough to have this temporary paternal, lively figure. So this is a very temporary experience for these guys. It is therapeutic. Does say something about what could be different in that environment. Right. So if Nurse Ratched were a little more lively, that could be good. But of course she could be too lively. We wouldn't want Nurse ratched to be McMurphy. That would be. Yeah, not good for them either. 27:07 Erin: Well, here's. Okay, maybe this is my bias or something, but one of the things I think that is detrimental to these guys or to anyone really is talking things to death. One of the things that he's doing is not necessarily just bringing in the instinctual. He's having them do things. It's like occupational therapy, you know, instead of just sitting around and being, you know, made to talk about these things which they don't want to talk about and which make them extremely uncomfortable and which make the men around them listening to it extremely uncomfortable. And instead of just this constant passive, this kind of like, you know, benevolent thing that Ratched is doing where you don't act at all, there's no activity and everything is suppressed. There's just the idea of let's watch the ball game together. Let's. Okay. Not necessarily getting drunk and sleeping with women and stuff like that, but going out and doing something. Just doing something. It seems that that's the big problem. These men want restraint. Well, it seems that they're already overly restrained in their behavior. They're inhibited in their behavior, and then all they want to do is talk about everything. 28:15 Wes: But we do know they're taken on field trips of some sort with that bus. We don't know exactly what they are. Right. 28:21 Erin: And they have the basketball court and they have cards. 28:27 Wes: Yeah. But it's pretty meager. Yeah, it's pretty. 28:30 Erin: Right. That seems important. And that's the role that. I mean, they're being taken on these field trips by the orderlies. Right. So it seems as though the actual therapeutic element is not incorporating this kind of thing. It seems that recreation is their break from talk therapy, which is their only recourse and their own. The only way that they're being ministered to psychologically. That, I think, is a. That's a problem for these men. I think they need to feel. I mean, I don't know. What do I know? I'm not an expert, but. But I would seem to me that they would maybe need to feel useful, that they are doing an activity that gives them some pride, like fishing. Being able to catch a fish. 29:10 Wes: Yeah. 29:11 Erin: Doing something that has an end result that they could feel accomplished. Not necessarily just sitting around and talking in circles like Harding does, or just getting embarrassed or, you know, talking all the time. Seems like something that. I mean, it's certainly something I don't want to do, you know, so if I were in this place, I wouldn't want to be constantly talking about my problems. That was. Seems to me that would be a very painful and detrimental thing if it were not broken up by some other form of therapy. Not electroshock. 29:42 Wes: Yeah. I think fishing field trips are a good idea. It's just the stealing the boat part. 29:49 Erin: Right. But I mean, like, in a directed, therapeutic way, rather than just. What are they being taken, for instance, to a movie theater to just sit passively in front of a screen? I don't know. You know, we don't really know. 30:00 Wes: Yeah. We don't see that in the film. And that's. You know, that's. I thought was interesting because we could have had this. We could have been hit over the head with this. We could have been shown a very depressing field trip. And maybe there was. And maybe that was cut out of the movie. We could have been shown orderly. You know, the orderlies are cruel and not great at points, but they're not like caricatures of cruel orderlies. 30:30 Erin: No, not at all. 30:31 Wes: And they're not even as bad as stories I've heard of, you know, institutions here in Massachusetts of what goes on. Right. So we could have been hit over the head more in the movie with that type of thing. I think it's going for a little bit more ambiguity or nuance in that respect. I think at the points where Nurse Ratched gets really cruel and humiliates Billy, for instance, there's no longer any nuance. But it's true to her. I still think it's true in a sense. Right. It's not just caricature. This is her character and it fits. And she can be in general, she's not necessarily acting out like that, but she does it. She does in that context, in a key moment. So, yeah, I totally agree that activity helps. And I used to basically force people to do that, which they hated, including socialization time, which is one of the things they mentioned in the movie. Forced socialization, not letting people be isolated. I had to do that. And they often were not happy with that. But this is a good point about talking is not going to be enough. And part of what's therapeutic, I think the point you're making has to come from real life. So I know you would have taken them to the baseball game. Definitely. 31:44 Erin: Of course. Of course. I mean, this is a lot of this, a lot of where I sort of agree with the film is this idea that too much. There's too much rumination. This seems to me to be the extremely prevalent problem that too much rumination, not enough action. And maybe that's easy for me to say, I don't know, because then maybe if people were just acting instead of ruminating, the world would be in chaos. But I think action of any kind, any kind of positive action. But then again, I don't want this conversation to devolve just into what I would do if I were running the institution. 32:19 Wes: But, yeah, and I'm just saying they have to be made feel safe to act. They have to feel like their action is not going to kill anyone or whatever. Dangerous things come from the use of one's impulses. 32:32 Erin: Well, and something about, actually, McMurphy coming back unscathed from ECT seems to increase everyone's feeling of safety. His resilience seems to inspire them with more courage, because that's when Cheswick gets upset over the cigarettes and fights back. And has some agency in that moment. It results in chaos because of Nurse Ratched's need for everything to be controlled and her refusal to sort of compromise with them or really listen to their concerns. I'm just interested in what you think in. Chief is particularly receptive to McMurphy. If I had to guess, I would say his being so inhibited as to not be able to speak or respond to people. McMurphy represents something that's. For him, you know, like a depressed person. Encountering Emerson, we somehow get to normal instead of from normal person to, you know, fascist dictator or whatever. The. Whatever the worrying effects of Emerson might be on someone. Too much confidence. But McMurphy's influence on him works like a tonic. 33:37 Wes: Yeah. So let's look at. Maybe let's look at what the Chief says about what's troubling him. Because, of course, he's. He's chosen not to speak and he's chosen to pretend that he's deaf, which. Who could blame him in that environment if he doesn't really want to communicate with all those people, he's there. He's using it more as a refuge. So, anyway, let's look. I think, yeah, it could help just to look at what the Chief says. So McMurphy says to him, chief, I can't take it no more. I gotta get out of here. And Chief says, he can't. And then McMurphy says, It's easier than you think, Chief. The Chief says, for you, maybe. You're a lot bigger than me. Which is a great line in the movie because we learn that, you know, despite his physical size the Chief thinks of himself as spiritually small, in a way. Murphy says, why, Chief? You're as big as a goddamn tree trunk. And then the Chief talks about his father. My papa's real big. He did like he pleased. So there's a reference to problems of impulse, which is one of the reasons why people shut down like this. That's why everybody worked on him. I don't know what that means exactly. The last time I seen my father, he was blind in the cedars from drinking. What does that mean, blind in the cedars? I mean, it sounds like he drank some bad alcohol and went blind. But blind in the Cedars or that just means blackout drunk. 35:04 Erin: I don't know. 35:04 Wes: Do you know what that means? 35:06 Erin: No, I don't. 35:07 Wes: The reason why I'm going to this speech is just. Yeah. I didn't have time to parse all of it, but I thought it was something we would come to, so. And Then he said it. And then every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don't suck out of it. It sucks out of him until he shrunk, so wrinkled and yellow, even the dogs don't know him. So his father was real big, but got smaller because of his impulses. The impulse. The release of impulses, in the case of his father did not lead right to vitality. Chief has learned the lesson that. 35:41 Erin: But people working on him, too. I think that's related perhaps to the fact that people were also sucking the life out of him. They were leeching off of that vitality. So he was somehow being victimized by the people around him in addition to being ruled by his own impulses. 35:58 Wes: Yeah, I just. Again, that's a line I find really opaque. I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, what you're saying makes sense. But he did like he pleased. Yeah. That's why everybody worked on him, took advantage of him. 36:11 Erin: Yeah. Like McMurphy, his sort of overabundance of sanity or his bigness or his capacity seems to put a target on his back. And that's the. What do they call it? Tall Poppy syndrome. Okay, you want to cut the tall poppy. The thing that stands out, stands above. 36:29 Wes: Okay, I like this. Yeah, this makes sense. So the Chief. And there are elements of McMurphy and the Chief's father, but what he saw was the destructive side of that. So his father became small by having the life sucked out of him by liquor. Right. And Dionysus is the God of liquor as well. So he seems to make himself small preemptively. And that includes by not speaking, pretending like he can't hear, not communicating with people. He's such a big, strong person, but he doesn't want to. It seems to me like, again, this is another place where he doesn't want to do something with his impulses anyway. So wrinkled and yellow that even the dogs don't know him. And then McMurphy says, Killed him. And he says, I'm not saying they killed him. They just worked on him the way they're working on you. Yeah, I don't know exactly what exactly that means. 37:26 Erin: Yeah, that sort of taking him down. So it's almost implied that he was, you know, his propensity for liquor was encouraged by the people around him. His self destruction was perhaps, you could say a setup, but that's a little bit too obvious or a little bit too naked. It would be something more envious and pernicious. But that similar relationship that ratched has to McMurphy and the tall poppy who needs to be neutralized through lobotomy because he cannot be brought into the fold or restrained in the way that she wishes to restrain or pacified in the way that she wishes to pacify him. 38:03 Wes: I mean, we do get. McMurphy becomes lobotomized, and he really is, in a sense, deaf and dumb. Right. He really is what the Chief was pretending to be. Completely out of touch. That comparison is a little bit rough, but you can see how seeing that, seeing someone else made that way in another person, I think might have put Chief in touch with the desire to not preemptively do that to himself, or not to partially be self lobotomized, so to speak, at least at a social level. So I don't know. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out here what it is about McMurphy that could have been especially therapeutic for Chief, despite the fact that this kind of McMurphy, like, character, Chief's father, really, it was. For him, it was just entirely destructive. Right. Alcohol and impulse and all that. 38:57 Erin: Maybe the desire to see McMurphy succeed where the father failed. So to see those two in parallel, and then ultimately, when McMurphy is made to fail, the decision to somehow. What can that mean? Decide that, you know, okay, if this is maybe an inevitability for those men who I find, great, then I'm going to let the world do it to me instead of doing it to myself. Perhaps. But that seems a pretty bleak way of interpreting that final act of freeing himself. 39:28 Wes: Yeah. And we know that it's not just seeing McMurphy lobotomized and then killing him. That. That's not entirely the catalyst for him breaking out. Because he says he's ready to do it, Right? He says, I knew you wouldn't leave without me. I was waiting for you. Now we can make it, Mac. I feel big as a damn mountain. So something has happened between the party and McMurphy's return to the ward. I guess that's enough for Chief to go from feeling too small to leave to feeling big enough to leave. And of course, there's that great symbolic act of throwing the. What is it, a hydrotherapy station or something? I don't know what. The big fixture. Anyway. 40:12 Erin: Yeah. 40:12 Wes: Waterfall. Taking that. Right. So he is literally physically big enough to lift it the way McMurphy wasn't and to tear it out of the floor and throw it through the window. And the parallel there, of course, is the psychological or spiritual lifting required. 40:31 Erin: Yeah. This is almost not worth saying, but if McMurphy returns from the dead with ECT. That's his resurrection. Now, this is his 40 days on earth of teaching his final lessons before he then goes off. Right. So in a way, it's like, okay, he needed. And now he's converted his faithful, and then he sort of ascends into the ether, and the work has been done. The conversion work has been done on Chief, or the work of the Holy Spirit, whatever you want to call it. And so now it's as if McMurphy has ascended. He's left, he's died, and. Yeah, ascended into whatever kind of Heaven will accept McMurphy. Aka, you know, hey, whatever direction he's traveling in, he's traveled there. 41:29 Wes: Or it's purgatory. And purgatory is just like a psychiatric unit 41:34 Erin: and he has to help Martini for the next thousand years. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So finally, teach Martini how to play blackjack. 41:43 Wes: Take people on fishing trips. Right. 41:45 Erin: That's a little too fun. It's not quite sufficiently purgatorial, especially if there's a candy on board. But anyway, yeah. 41:53 Wes: This is going to be the final word. Word. What you're saying. Oh. 41:55 Erin: Oh, no. 41:56 Wes: This Comparing. 41:58 Erin: No, no, no, no. Please, let's say something else. 42:01 Wes: This is the way the episode needs to end. 42:06 Erin: Oh, no. What did we miss? What did we. What final word can we end on 42:12 Wes: that isn't Misogynist Jesus? Misogynist Jesus. What are some other good names? Evil Jesus. I don't know. He's died for our sins. And when I say for our sins, I mean so that we can continue. 42:30 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Well, 42:36 Wes: do you have any other last words? 42:41 Erin: I can't. I feel my frontal lobe is not. Not communicating anymore with the rest of my. 42:47 Wes: Is there anything you would like to take back. For the sake of your soul? 42:57 Erin: Many things. Many things. 43:00 Wes: All right, thank you. 43:02 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to R.P. McMurphy. And it’s true that the game he is playing—lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free-spirited—is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy’s introduction of the Dionysian, to Ratched’s attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin discuss the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to RP McMurphy. And it's true that the game he is playing, lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free spirited, is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy's introduction of the Dionysian to Ratched's attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of Superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Today we discuss the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, what would you do if someone tried to stop you from watching the World Series? Would you start a riot? 1:21 Erin: I would and I have. 1:23 Wes: I know that baseball is very important to you. 1:25 Erin: It is, yeah. That was one of the more personally affecting moments in the film. I will say let them watch the World Series. The significance of the way he calls that imaginary game was not lost on me either. I thought, interesting that that was a series, which is a little painful for me to think about because the Yankees were swept in four games by the Dodgers. But he imagines that Sandy Koufax is being beaten by the batter, which, you know, not literally, but he's imagining that Koufax is. Is pitching and his. And the ball is being hit out of the park, which I think is, you know, a pretty anti authoritarian kind of statement in and of itself. You know, pitching is basically fascist and batters are. Batters are trying to resist the authority of the pitcher, which, you know, baseball is also the only, I think the only sport that I know of where the defense has the ball. Listeners can correct me if I'm wrong about that. Yeah. So he imagines that the. The anti authoritarian batter defeats the great pitcher Sandy Koufax in that moment, even though it's not literally true. It is a fantasy. 2:29 Wes: Did you know that from memory that 2:31 Erin: I know that the 63. Yeah, I know the record. I know that's an infamous World Series if you're a Yankees fan. So I don't know. The play by play. Somebody might have gotten a home run off of Koufax over the course of the series, but I just thought it was interesting that he was imagining they were getting beaten. 2:51 Wes: So this is set in 1963. I don't think I knew that. It's a 1975 movie. Right. Based on a novel. Do we know when the novel was set? I mean. Sorry. When the novel was published? 3:03 Erin: Yeah, I think It's. I think 62, for some reason. So I don't. 3:06 Wes: Yeah, it is 62. Yeah. Ken Kesey. Ken Kesey. 3:11 Erin: Have you read it? 3:12 Wes: No, I haven't. I downloaded it. I thought I might read a little bit, but I didn't end up reading anything. Have. Have you. So I think that was his one big. He wrote another novel. I don't know if he had any other big successes, but. Yeah. When I. When I suggested we do this movie, I was curious about whether you were excited to do it or. Where does this movie stand for you? Well, yeah, there you go. This is what I thought I did. You didn't see that. Excited. 3:41 Erin: Is this the kind of movie I'm supposed to get excited about with? You know, I mean, I think the. The title. You know, when one thinks of this film, you don't think it's gonna necessarily be the most fun you've ever had, 3:54 Wes: but it's got Jack Nicholson, but it's. 3:57 Erin: Yeah. Acting like it has something. 3:59 Wes: Are we gonna get a Jack Nicholson impression from you? 4:01 Erin: No, no, I wouldn't dare. I wouldn't dare. 4:03 Wes: No. Because we got a compliment on your 4:08 Erin: Daniel. Plainview. 4:10 Wes: Your Daniel Plainview. 4:11 Erin: I'm slipping. 4:12 Wes: That's my impression. 4:15 Erin: No, I mean, I think I had seen it in my early 20s and it had really disturbed me. You know, maybe not the best time personally for me to be watching a movie like that, frankly, but I think the prospect filled me with a little bit of dread because I wasn't really remembering that. There were a lot of funny moments. It seemed like it might be something that would be heavy in various ways, and it was. But I just came away with a real admiration for the performances. I mean, one of the best supporting casts ever, I think. I just absolutely love those group scenes. 4:51 Wes: Danny DeVito. 4:52 Erin: I know. 4:52 Wes: Getting the ball out of the park. 4:54 Erin: Yeah. 4:55 Wes: He can act, actually. 4:57 Erin: How dare you? 4:58 Wes: Oh, no. Because you like the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is that the. 5:06 Erin: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's the. That's the bar, huh? No, like Romancing the Stone and. I don't know any of his sitcom performances. 5:18 Wes: Yeah, but in Romancing the Stone, you know, he's just doing his Danny DeVito thing. 5:22 Erin: Yeah, but that's. That's. That's what I like. 5:24 Wes: He's a real character. He's not just himself. He's a. But. Yeah, so while I picked it, I was just looking at a list of. Maybe I was looking at that AFI list of Hundred greatest movies or something. Something I wanted to see. And specifically the 70s, of course, since that's the. For me, the golden age of filmmaking, it's gotta be in the 70s. But I didn't remember having any particular feeling about the movie, except, I mean, I think it had been so long since I watched it. I remember being impressed by it, but I remembered very little of it. I think, as I watched it, I remembered the ECT scene with Jack Nicholson. That was something that really stayed with me. The iconic final scene, of course, but also that's been parodied so much that, you know, how can you not know that scene even if you haven't seen the movie? 6:15 Erin: I had forgotten that scene. 6:19 Wes: Wow, that's interesting. 6:20 Erin: Yeah. 6:21 Wes: We'll have to discuss what that means. 6:24 Erin: That part of my brain was cut out. 6:27 Wes: The large part of you, the free. The large part of you, the big man yearning for freedom. I remembered Nurse Ratched and her general demeanor. Although I always thought her name was Nurse Ratchet, I did not realize there was a D at the end of that name. And I wonder if when I hear people say it, am I just mishearing it or are they making the same mistake? I don't know, but it's a really clever name. And maybe we should just start with that because it seems to be combination of ratchet and wretched. And I think we could say she has both of those aspects to her character. Right. So Ratchet being a kind of wrench that you. You can move and only, you know, it's tightening will only happen in one direction. So you don't have to actually take the wrench off and put it back on and then tighten again. So if you're in a tight space, you can just do a back and forth motion. It's very convenient. So, you know, you can use it to loosen as much as to tighten. But I think we think of her as someone who is very tightened and also maybe someone who. The way she manipulates others in her very iconically passive aggressive way. You could think of the Ratchet as being involved in that. Winding people up, so to speak, during group therapy, which is not really what you're supposed to do. And then the other part of it is just wretched, we imagine. Well, the ratchet is the way to deal with the wretchedness in her case. And we're left to speculate about what her wretchedness entails. Although we can see in her character and her personality that there's a lack of vitality. There's a kind of flatness. Therapists would say her affect is flat. She does give off a sense of peace and serenity. I think before you get to know her. Right. You could call it a poker face of a certain sort. But we see that there's a lot of anger underneath all that. 8:24 Erin: It's one of those moments where I'm grateful to be hosting this podcast with a man, because I never would have thought of that ratchet. I don't actually know how ratchets work, so that's very helpful. 8:37 Wes: Well, you're also a big baseball fan, so I don't know. 8:41 Erin: That's one of the few things I can say. 8:44 Wes: I know pretty well. And I would not have been surprised if you were secretly a car mechanic. 8:50 Erin: I know, I know, I know. It would be very Marisa Tomei of me if I were. But alas, I'll just come out and say that I think there are some elements of misogyny in the film which bother me. I Wonder about dressing Ms. Ratched up in the Civil War nurse kind of cape at the beginning of the film. What we're supposed to ultimately glean from her character. I mean, she's certainly sadistic, and she certainly does wind these men up, and she certainly is no help to them in group therapy, and she's certainly an extremely emasculating presence. But are we supposed to get the sense from her that she believes she's helping? 9:29 Wes: Yeah, I would say at a conscious level. 9:31 Erin: Okay. 9:32 Wes: That's the impression I got. 9:33 Erin: You know, we could say that she's sort of the ultimate evil mother figure and that she seems to want to keep these men in a state of dependence on her, which seems to counteract the therapeutic intentions behind her behavior. Basically keep them in this womb where they're not going to make any progress, where they're not going to have any agency or think for themselves in any way. And she seems also to have, I mean, I think this other nurse that Miss. What is it? Pilbow? Is that her name? You know, this is sort of silent. She does say a few things at the beginning of the film, but then it seems as though she reacts to Jack Nicholson's sort of characterological force by retreating more and more into herself. And then the only expression or noise that she makes past a certain point in the film is to scream at seeing Billy. So is her silence a result of Ratched's dominance? Is it a result of Nicholson's force, which, you know, the force of his personality which seems to cause her to become more and more submissive or more and more silent or unable to move, or the battle of wills that goes on between Nicholson or I should say McMurphy and Ratched is really interesting because I remembered it being more aggressive than what actually happens, which is, in fact, very little. Except for when he's strangling her. There's. 11:01 Wes: Yes, yeah, maybe let's pause on that point because I think that's important, which is that if I had the same experience, if you re watch the movie, after some time, you'll think, oh, well, she's not so bad for a while. 11:15 Erin: Right, Right. 11:17 Wes: She's. What is she? You know, she's dealing with a bunch of crazy people and she's keeping her calm and, you know. Yeah, her affect and the way she presents herself is a bit creepy, but it really is kind of a slow boil, I think, with our discovery of her sadism. I mean, we do get a sense of it in the. In group therapy with her, I think, actively trying to humiliate men around romantic relationships. Right. So with Harding talking about his wife and then with Billy, Billy seems to be very ashamed of his sexuality and she's really rubbing that in, which is important because in a way, Jack Nicholson's character, McMurphy as a sort of representative of Dionysius and a satyr and a sex criminal, you know, he's very much about anti shame when it comes to sexuality. So that's another sense in which he represents an opposing force to Ratched. So I think we can speculate that she's in a situation. This is her way of relating to men. And it may be her only way of relating to men is being with men who she has complete control over men who are vulnerable because of their mental health. And then she plays out this thing which really has something to do with her by intruding into their sex lives. Right. So normal therapy and normal group therapy is not this intrusive. You don't. I think as McMurphy later objects or someone objects, you don't try to get people to talk about these things if they don't really want to. Yeah. So the point I was trying to get to, just to reinforce what you were saying is that she's likely entirely unconscious of her sadism and thinks that she's helping even as she's hurting. But this is something all therapists have to watch out for. So it's very easy to be convinced that what you're doing is in the spirit of being constructive and helpful. But maybe it's not right. Maybe the question you ask the patient about some detail in their life is not really about being helpful to them, but it's about your own morbid curiosity or your own even perverse curiosity, or it may be even something sadistic that's coming out some kind of enactment. And this is something we do all the time in relationships. You know, it's not. Not just in therapy and trying to get good at noticing these enactments. I mean, that's a real art and it's a lifelong project. But, yeah, she is deep into it. 13:41 Erin: Yeah. I think certainly the group therapy sessions I saw as a form of ritual humiliation. And yet one of the things that bothered me about the film, one of the things I perceived as being perhaps misogynistic, is the fact that there's hardly a character in the film who is not there because of a woman or because of a problem with a woman. Even that opening scene where McMurphy comes in in those shackles that are attached to that, you know, that belt in the. I guess it's the atrium of the asylum, and there's that winding staircase above him and all of these matronly women in plain clothes, presumably the mothers of the patients that are visiting them, you know, looking down on him. It's like this, you know, this image of just incredible maternal oversight or overbearing. 14:34 Wes: Oh, I thought these were female patients. 14:37 Erin: They're in normal dress. 14:39 Wes: Are they? 14:39 Erin: Yeah, and I don't know that they would be. You know, we don't get any indication that there are female patients in the build, I think. Would there not be hijinks to try and get to that supply of. 14:52 Wes: Well, I was thinking they were in a different ward or unit or something, but, yeah, maybe. Sounds like I hallucinated this. 14:59 Erin: So there's the idea that these men are here because of some negative relationship with a woman. Or in McMurphy's case, it's statutory rape. But women are somehow made to be responsible for their either voluntary or involuntary commitment, possibly accepting. Chief. But still, it seems that, yeah, the purpose of harping on this in these group therapy sessions is to humiliate them around these relationships so that she's protecting, particularly exploiting this. And, you know, I wonder what the position of a female nurse is or should be to these types of patients. Like, it seems just inappropriate to me that they would have a female nurse working with these men. I mean, that's like a huge problem right there. And then I also thought about the fact of her dress and what seemed to me to be a very clear sort of civil war coded like she looks like Florence Nightingale when she first comes into the building. There's a very Civil War era type of look to that cape. And I thought about the position of nurses historically, battlefield nurses, as women who are. They're in the position of serving men who have been wounded over the course of, you know, enacting this large scale aggression against each other. So that seems to be sort of inverted for Nurse Ratched or flipped on its head, whereby the only way that she can relate to men is in this wounded state, as I think you've already suggested, but that the more helpless they are, the more she seems to like them. Which seems to be why she's catering her treatment to the most emasculated or denatured of the men in the ward. You know, she's insistent that even men who are not coherent have a vote for the World Series. She's insistent that the music needs to be turned up for older men who may not be able to hear it, even if it affects those men with good hearing and makes it impossible for them to talk to each other or makes them aggravated so that everything is tailored or catered to the most wounded among them. So it seems that this is not about traditional nursing in which you would help these men get back to the state of vigor so that they could go back out and be men and fight on the battlefield in this particular case, but that you wish to keep them in a state of needing your care. And I wanted to tie that back to the fact that they seem to be there because of women. So that too seems to be a kind of, you know, she's not nursing them because they've been wounded in battle. They somehow had a wound to their masculinity. And rather than putting them in a position where that masculinity can be restored, Nurse Ratched is trying to leech more and more of that from them somehow, so that it's sort of a double bind that she has them in both in her position as a nurse and in her position as someone who's supposed to be helping men with a particular kind of wound. 18:04 Wes: Yeah, I think she has something important in common with those men, which is that she like them this is speculation, but I think this is what we're meant to believe. She, like them, cannot really be in a romantic relationship and this is a replacement. So for the men, they don't have the maturity or the mental health to do that. And that is part of why they're there. And romantic relationships, of course, features prominently in people's mental health problems or in their distress. And that includes the very first romantic relationship, the one with one's own mother, which is why. Part of why misogyny is such a prevalent thing in men and in women. Mothers get a lot of blame, consciously or unconsciously. And she is also, in a way, a quasi maternal figure. I think it's. It wouldn't be uncommon to have a woman running group therapy. And as you know, as I've mentioned on the show, I ran a halfway house for the mentally ill for seven years and that was a live in position. And I had four staff members and usually my staff members were female. And that's just based on the applications that I was getting. And mental health now is a very female dominated field. 19:16 Erin: But even in a specifically male, like in an institutional setting with only male inmates, it's just surprising to me that there are no men that are there to administer any kind of therapy. 19:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, there's Dr. Spivey, but we don't see him very. Is that Spivak maybe? 19:35 Erin: Is the name Spivey. Spivey or Spivey, let's call him Doc like everyone else. 19:39 Wes: Yeah, Spivy. All right, Spivey. But we don't see much of him because Nurse Ratched is one of the most capable nurses. 19:47 Erin: Right. Well, there's a. Did you see the sign at one point at the nurse's station that says if you would like to make an appointment to see the doctor, see Nurse Ratched, you have to go through her to see a male authority figure. And then those male authority figures, of course, are shown as being extremely ineffectual and ultimately under her thumb. They take her advice. 20:10 Wes: She's got a bunch of orderlies who are very much under her thumb. And then I think you're talking about the other administrators as well, anonymous administrators, because she is able to convince them to keep McMurphy there. And we'll talk about later why that's so important when they think he should be cut loose and sent loose, so to speak, and sent back to jail. I had a similar thought that it was odd in the sense that, well, the orderlies are there to deal with aggression. So there's that as Far as the safety factor goes. But there is an odd aspect of the setting in the sense that you have. Right. She can go behind the desk and there's a window there that can be closed, as if that's some element of safety. When, as we find out, it's easy for one of the patients to just go and open the door and go into that little office. And it was relatively easy for McMurphy to punch through that window when the time comes. So the window is window dressing, so to speak. And she is often out right on the floor anyway, so there's something interesting there about the division. Her sense in which she's a spectator, where she kind of remains aloof, remains behind that window. And the same thing with using the use of the microphone. Neither of them is really of that much use the microphone or the window. I mean, you know, she can make announcements on the yard, but it doesn't seem like there's much to do in that respect. I think it has more to do with how she needs to relate to the men, which is to have this position of control, but to do it at a distance. 21:48 Erin: Yeah. Thinking through that a little bit. The microphone allows her to never have to raise her voice so she can keep that same volume level and that sort of flat affect in the voice but amplify it through the microphone. 22:02 Wes: Very good. Yeah, very important. 22:04 Erin: I think there's probably something similar happening with the ultimate ineffectualness of the window in the nurse's station. And yet the idea that it's there to enforce some sort of sense of a barrier, even if the barrier doesn't really exist, or some sort of power distinction. 22:20 Wes: Role distinction. Yeah. 22:22 Erin: And also a sense of serenity as well. Like a sort of veneer of, you know, you have to go up and you have to knock on the window. And there's almost a. Come to think of it, you know, there's almost a kind of a courtliness about it, like they have to go up and they have to advance up to the window and make their request and, you know, Nurse Ratched has to then let down her hair or whatever, that kind of thing. There's a little bit of a fortification of her power which at the same time preserves a kind of femininity where she doesn't have to become aggressive or assert any kind of vim or vigor into what she does. 23:01 Wes: Yeah. I think the movie conveys this sense of serenity from the very beginning where we see her car driving in at a distance, you know, in the landscape. The one that Chief will end up running out into. In the end. And then she's, you know, she enters and walks down the hallway and says her good mornings. This will be bookended, you know, near the end of the movie when they find the aftermath of the party, those good mornings happen as well, but in a much different context. So she's saying her good mornings to the orderlies and then moving on to medication and then music. So there's a lot of alliteration. And then after that, McMurphy, morning, good morning, medication, music and McMurphy. But the. Yeah, the first three are all about serenity and pacification. Pacify them with medication, pacify them with pleasant music, but music that's too loud and so is in a passive aggressive way, driving them crazy at the same time, right? And so, yeah, it's a very Apollonian world, a world of peace. Right. That McMurphy, as a representative of Dionysius, I think, will intrude upon. He's given a very contrasting entrance, right? We see him come in through the same gate as Nurse Ratched comes in, but he, unlike her, is dancing and playing the fool and doing all that, being the satyr, being the trickster. We get that sense in the very beginning. We get the sense that these two people are characterological opposites. This power dynamic I think we're talking about, you can see it repeated in different ways. So, for instance, there's an interesting power dynamic between Harding and Cheswick, where Cheswick is almost like the helpless, dependent part of oneself. He's a bit of a baby. He can get stressed out and start crying easily. He's impressionable, maybe, and in need of someone in control. And then Harding is very, very much in control. And they seem to be a kind of pair, feeding off of each other in the beginning in their game, although McMurphy is going to very much interfere with that dynamic. But we can think of this as an intrapsychic dynamic as well, between the powerful side of oneself, the part of oneself that's in control, and then a potentially disavowed helpless part of oneself, what Jung would call like a shadow ego. So naturally, we'd speculate that this is a dynamic that's internal to Ratched's own psyche, her own character. And what she is ultimately fending off is her own sense of helplessness and humiliation. Something which, of course, is going to show up in the context of romantic relationships and keep her, if my speculation is correct, keep her from being able to engage in that. And the same thing for the men in this. This ward that's part of why they're not capable of engaging in these relationships because of the kinds of power dynamics involved in intimacy, surrender, helplessness. Things that just can be too unbearable if you don't have your psychical shit together, so to speak. So now she enacts this. She enacts her role as a nurse, a mental health nurse as a kind of substitute for a romantic relationship with a bunch of helpless men that she can be a helper to nominally but also engage in sadistic control of. 26:30 Erin: That's really well put. What do we take then of the fact that McMurphy seems to feed off of her as well? I mean, I thought one of the more interesting observations that these doctors make is that the person that McMurphy is closest to is also the person he dislikes the most. Right. They're in this. It's like mom and dad. Mom and dad are always fighting in the ward. And that, I don't know, need to put a bee in her bonnet, or however he puts it. Need to. The need to dress her down somehow seems to also be the compulsion that's driving him. I mean, one would, I suppose, say that he sees her as a repressed person who it's his job to sort of antagonize or bother out of her repression. And that's going to be his therapeutic role with her. I mean, I don't know if he sees her in those terms. He seems to view himself as a more proper therapist for the men than she is. So certainly has a therapeutic relationship to the other men. But I wonder if that extends to her as well or if he simply sees her as a sort of like, asexual, antagonistic force. 27:44 Wes: Yeah, I don't think he's thinking about being a therapeutic presence at all. I just think he inadvertently is. Right. He's, like, stealing from people. He's robbing all these people of her cigarettes. This becomes a big deal later on. And Ratched kind of has a good defense of herself. Keeping your cigarettes in the room, in the office so you won't get robbed by this guy. It's not. Not everything she's doing is completely unfair. Right. He's selfish. He's sexually. Right. He's sexually ravenous to the point of not really caring about the other person. I assume the two women in the movie are prostitutes. I think it's clear in the book. But that's probably about the kind of relationship that he can have, is a relationship with prostitutes. So he is also, you know, impaired, I think, in this way, as the other the other men are. But with Ratched. Let's look at that moment, because there's a moment where there's a card game. This is really kind of at the end of the first act, but at the end of the first act, there's a card game that goes awry. 28:47 Erin: Is this the Martini? 28:49 Wes: Oh, yeah. 28:50 Erin: Martini, sing Hit Me over and over again. 28:53 Wes: Yes. But also, the way it starts out is hilarious because Martini wants to bet a nickel and so breaks the cigarette in half because each cigarette represents a dime. And McMurphy says, if you break it in half, you don't get two nickels, you get shit. Try and smoke it. You understand? Yes. At a certain point, this ends up with Martini impulsively asking McMurphy to hit him in blackjack. And then what happens? 29:23 Erin: He shows remarkable restraint and not hitting Martini. Same thing in the Monopoly game. I feel really bad for Harding, who 29:32 Wes: I love, by the way. So I'm just seeing this in my notes here. This is the first time, because I know some essays have compared him to a Christ figure, right? And is he Dionysius? Is he a trickster? Is he a Christ figure? And before I'd even seen any of that, this is the moment where I thought, God, this is like Jesus and the lepers. He's surrounded by all these needy people. He's inverse Jesus, of course, because he's just trying to take advantage of them, really have fun. But he is showing a certain amount of restraint towards them. And then he loses it. And. Right. And he doesn't take it out on them. He takes it out on the Pharisees, so to speak. So he's like, jesus Christ Almighty. Do you nuts want to play cards or do you want to fucking jerk off? Sounds like a lot like a lot like Jesus. Play the game. I can't even hear myself think already here. All right. Now, there's a good reason he can't hear himself think is because Martini is saying, hit me over and over again. These guys are off their rockers, but instead he heads towards the nurses station. In fact, he goes into the office and Pilbow screams when she sees him in there and says, stay back. Again, this is like the whole weird office thing where suddenly they're dangerous because they're in the office. You're around them on the floor all the time. But patients aren't allowed in the nurses station, as she said. So he's broken a rule. Law and order has been defied. So he has to get out of the office and get in line at the window and Ask for the music to be turned down. And then she'll say, that music is. And this is ratchet. Now, that music is for everyone, Mr. McMurphy. I know, but do you think we might ease it down a little so maybe the boys didn't have to shout? What you probably don't realize is that we have a lot of volt. And then she gives that explanation. She's not just trying to drive them all crazy with loud music. She's trying to do a good thing for the people who can't hear. In any case, that's the. After that, he will go back to the sit down with the other guys. And then he reveals that he hasn't actually taken his medication by blowing a pill onto Harding's forehead. And then he'll say, God almighty, she's got you guys coming and going. What do you think she is, some kind of champ or something? This way of viewing the world through the lens of sports, World Series or basketball, it's very important to understanding McMurphy's character. Is she a champion boxer? Do you think she's going to knock you out? And then Harding says, no, I thought you were the champ. And that's where he says, you want to bet? I bet in one week I can put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch. 32:18 Erin: Yeah, that's a pretty good line. 32:20 Wes: Later on, of course, he's going to be upset with these guys. They didn't warn him. When he finds out that they can keep him here as long as they want. And he's got a lot to lose in this confrontation, he finds that upsetting. But at this point, he doesn't know that he has that much to lose. And after that first real confrontation with Ratched, yeah, he's ready to go to war, so to speak, or to be a kind of tormentor to her, to give her a taste of her own medicine in a way, right? 32:50 Erin: Well, she doesn't. He's upset because she doesn't fight fair. And this is one of the things that's really subtly done early on. For instance, with Martini and the cards, right? He's counting the queen as a number card and doesn't recognize that the queen is somehow. That logic does not extend to the queen. You know, the queen is outside of the logic of numbers, right? And to a certain extent, you know, when these guys are being antagonized by a woman, there isn't really a way for them to fight back. I mean, eventually, McMurphy will fight back physically. You know, maybe this is related to the idea of the window I was thinking about. Okay. There's the sort of the soft window, if you will, of the nurses station and then the hard window of the outside of the building. Right. That they have to crash through. And this imagery of punching. And our introduction to McMurphy as a fighter who compares himself to Rocky Marciano and says, you know, he gets millions of dollars for fighting and how come I'm here? Because I'm a fighter. And. And again, yeah, the Ratched thing. Calling her a champ. But he's going to be upset because she doesn't fight fair. 33:51 Wes: She likes a rigged game. 33:52 Erin: She likes a rigged game, Right. 33:54 Wes: Speaking of the World Series. 33:55 Erin: Right. Because she's the queen. She doesn't have. She's not a number. She's not, you know, one of these guys with. In McMurphy's case, maybe a number plate in the cases of the other guys, one of the numberless masses of inmates. Right. 34:10 Wes: And he's referring back to the rigged vote they take about the World Series, which is that she. They unanimously vote in group therapy to watch the World Series that evening. But she wants to include all the people left on the ward who can't communicate, which turns out to be nine people. And then he has to lobby them. And finally he gets the chief to raise his hand, but by the time. To vote for watching the World Series. But by the time he does that, she says the vote. Right. The meeting was terminated and the vote closed or something like that. Some very officious bureaucratic thing to say. So she rigs the game, so to speak. She rigs the vote on the watching of the game. 34:51 Erin: Right. Again, this is the catering to the patients who are more debilitated. So keeping the volume up. Giving the catatonic patients a vote in the proceedings, even though they can't hear what's going on. And they're also, like, even too far away to hear, the majority of them, there's that old man who's always dancing, who's my favorite character, I think, but, you know, does not. Well, actually, I love Cheswick. He's. He's so adorable. I love that actor. But, yeah, the old man dancing is like a very fanciful. He seems like a fun guy. I don't know. Anyway, they're very concerned that he's gonna tire himself out, which seems to be, like, probably a good thing if they want him to stop, but whatever. I don't know. I don't have their qualifications. So what do I know. Yeah. So she's playing these passive aggressive games which seem related to this again, this queenliness or this idea that because she's the nurse and she's in this sort of untouchable and yet literally quite touchable little fortification, she can make these pronouncements and everybody just has to adhere to her rules. And she sort of hides behind catering to the most defenseless among the men, which seems like she's standing up for them, but which is in fact this way of enforcing passivity to emasculate those who are not passive or something. It's, it's this perverted feminine game that she is playing, which is one of the reasons why I find this, this very frustrating to watch. So she's sort of leaning on a certain kind of passive aggressive femininity as a way to enforce this control. I think, I think this is what it ultimately comes down to, though. I don't want to put things in those terms. It's like hitting a guy over and over again and saying, haha, you can't hit me back because I'm a woman. You know, there's an element of that to this dynamic. 36:48 Wes: Yeah, it's a very hidden form of violence, if you want to call it that. So I think psychoanalysts would call it project what she's doing, projective identification, where she takes emotions or parts of herself that are objectionable, like for instance, helplessness. And she finds suitable objects outside of herself to put that into. And it may already be there to some extent. Right. That makes them even more suitable. But she can create a little drama with a bunch of characters around her in this particular situation that are acting out her internal psychological dynamics so that she can see them outside of herself and get some sort of gratification from that and not have to feel as chaotic inside. She creates the chaos outside. You know, with men, men are often more likely to be just physically aggressive. So in my house, for instance, where I was residence director, I dealt with a lot of women with borderline personality disorder where this kind of projective identification dynamic is very common. Although we all do it right. It's really about a spectrum, men and women. We all do it. Borderline personality disorder is more common in women than men, although you see a few men narcissism common in both sexes. But what I didn't have, I didn't have physically violent men because those men usually just end up in prison like McMurphy. I had men who were schizophrenics, I had men who were depressed or bipolar, usually the aggression is turned inward in the type of people who are going to end up in a hospital setting like this, which is why McMurphy stands out. If I had a McMurphy, I could easily, and I may have been called Nurse Ratched at some point. I don't even know. Because you are trying to keep control and you're trying to keep calm and you're trying to get people to follow rules, and everyone thinks you're an asshole to some extent for doing that. So I'm very sympathetic to her. But if I'd seen someone with sociopathic qualities and had it happened maybe on a couple of occasions, including someone who I thought was very dangerous, in which case you really have to treat that person with kid gloves and a lot of respect, even as you're enforcing the rules. You have to be careful not to humiliate, not to shame, because that's a situation. It can legitimately lead to physical violence. And you can feel it. If you have any intuition. You. You know the situation you're in and you know you have to be careful. But again, very rare in the kind of setting I was in, because men like that tend to go straight to prison if they have a propensity for physical violence. But social violence, of course, much easier to get away with. And we all engage in it unconsciously to some extent. But what she's doing, she has a very toxic, extreme level of this. This passive aggression that Ratched is engaging in. And it doesn't help that she's in a position of power that where she can it facilitates her engaging in it. Right. Who knows if when she was younger she was in a better position where she wasn't tempted by that power to feed this part of her psyche. [email protected] subtextpodcast otherwise, you can wait a week to listen to it as a separate episode in the feed. 40:16 Erin: All right, thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. We're still talking about the birthmark. I think we're just about ready to wrap up. Wes. What have we missed? What more do we need to talk about here? 0:45 Wes: In line with the birthmark representing the instinctual or something about her affective life, is the fact that it's kind of like a mood ring, right? So it reflected every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart. And so again, I think the Hawthorne is more vague about this in it representing human frailty. But I want to highlight the sense in which it represents affective life. Emotions, feelings, the instinctual side of life. Because this is a theme that I think shows up repeatedly, right? So even in Medea with Jason and his kind of cold, he could have had acid stains on his hands, too. Been a pale scientist, Mr. Rational Jason versus Medea, who I thought was more representative of the instinctual. And I thought in a way the play was a warning about, in the Athenian classical period, the dangers of the rejection of the instinctual as well as the traditional, arguably, and rejection of a part of life that was less rational. It comes back to bite you in the ass and maybe it will cut up your brother and throw him in the ocean. But in any case. So here again, I think the rejection of what is instinctual in women, what is sexual in women, what is physical and women, this is psychologically quite common. And in this case, it shows up as a. It becomes a scientific project, right? What if I can turn her into a Madonna and completely spiritualize her by using science? It's like. It's almost like it's a very. Of course, it's a variation Frankenstein, which I guess was written 48 years before, right. Where he's not creating a monster out of graveyard parts. He's given up on trying to breathe life into matter and create life, but he's going to take imperfect life and create perfect spirit out of it, right? 2:50 Erin: Yeah. I think this mood ring quality that you're pointing to is what hinted to me that Aylmer is likely impotent. We have the explanation of this quality. It says in the usual state of her complexion, a healthy, though delicate bloom, the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed, it gradually became more indistinct and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale, there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. So its appearance seems relative to the extent to which she blushes. Right. So if she's reddening because of anger, which she already has by the time we read this paragraph, then it disappears. But also a blush which is obviously sexually suggestive would cause it to disappear as well. So it seems to me that the fact that it stands out so strongly because she's always pale, because she's. Because he, you know, is always examining her rather than really being in any kind of relationship to her. You know, a marital relationship, a sexual relationship, Playing. 4:05 Wes: He's playing doctor with her. 4:08 Erin: Well, but. But. But not in such a way that. That she. 4:12 Wes: Not in the fun way that kids. 4:13 Erin: Not in the fun way. That's right. That's right. 4:16 Wes: In the asexual, adult way. 4:19 Erin: Right. I mean. I mean, not to make this a little too spicy or whatever, but, you know, the idea is that if she were blushing all the time, you would never see it. You know, if he was. If he was actually paying her, shall we say, the proper attentions, then it would become less distinct. But because of his relationship to her, which is one of, like a. Like a diagnostic or critical relation causing her pallor, it stands out all the more. Not that he could just be having sex with her all the time. 4:49 Wes: That's right. 4:50 Erin: But I'm just saying that it would, 4:52 Wes: you know, the hand is glowing again. All right. Time for sex. Yeah, that's really interesting. This is. I like this. And it's like this glaring reminder he hasn't. Pleasing his woman. 5:04 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. 5:08 Wes: It's an accusation. Yeah. Why the shape of a hand? What is that about? Other than. I mean, Hawthorne does give us some ideas, but did you have any ideas? Like, ultimately, it's something that's grasping her heart. Right. But there's this infantile, creepy quality to it. Like it's a little baby hand or fetus hand or something. 5:30 Erin: A doll hand. And the sleeves of Kristen Wiig. 5:33 Wes: Yes. I sent you the. Yeah. Because I couldn't help but be reminded of that Kristen Wiig skit in. Which is it? Dooneese. And I did some research. I probably did more research on that than I did on the birthmark. But trying to figure out how did she get the idea for that skit. Because she kind of has these deformities like this huge forehead and she's in a musical group with a bunch of. 6:00 Erin: Was I looking at her through a bubble or does she attractive or is her forehead really big? 6:08 Wes: In contrast all these other attractive, well formed, let's just say women. And then she has the little, tiny, tiny hands, which are. Kristen Wiig uses these obviously fake doll hands for the tiny hands. And it is just. I remember when I first saw that skit and I just thought, I don't have any idea why this is so funny. It's just so random. But there is just something. I think the little doll hand extended all the way down into my heart and grabbed it. 6:38 Erin: There you go. 6:39 Wes: But there is a creepy quality. I wonder if that's readers reaction or if other readers have this reaction in general, whether during Hawthorne's time or contemporary readers, whether they get that same creeped out reaction to the fact that it's this little tiny hand that's on her cheek. 6:59 Erin: Yeah, well, the hand is also called pretty. We're told had she been less beautiful if Envy's self could have found aught else to sneer at he meaning Aylmer might have felt his affection heightened by the prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart. 7:19 Wes: He does kiss it at one point, right? Gross. 7:21 Erin: He does once. He does once. 7:23 Wes: Shudders he tries to overcome his repulsion 7:25 Erin: but well, it's right as it's going to be leaving her that he sort of kisses it goodbye. In a way there's an element of fantasy, you know, it's imagined to be a fairy hand. And I think the flitting, you know, now you see it, now you don't kind of quality to it also has that sort of fantastical or magical or magical. Yeah, it's sort of toying with people. The idea that I had, I had a couple of them. But you know, one of them, of course, as I said, was this idea of the hand as sort of Aylmer's fancy or has been imprinted upon her cheek because of his desire to push her away. So it is in a way him pushing her away. And it's. And I think in the dream too we get this idea that, you know, as he's in the dream, as he's cutting into her with a knife and the hand is then grasping around her heart, the hand is responding to his, to the movements of the knife. So it does seem to be a kind of embodiment of something in him, responsive to him. But it's almost as though he's idealized her, then married her, had sex with her, and he himself has been the one who has stained her with this birthmark. Was another idea that I had. 8:37 Wes: Right, yeah, absolutely. He took her virginity. Yeah. 8:41 Erin: The other thing, though, that I thought was, I love the descriptions of the fairy hand, as I said, but also of the men who find this to be very charming. In other words, healthy men. Yeah. 8:54 Wes: Let me just read a little bit of this, what you're referring to here. So its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy, at her birth hour, had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied exceedingly. I love that fairy sign manual varied exceedingly according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some fastidious persons, but they were exclusively of her own sex, affirm that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty and rendered her countenance even hideous. And then he goes on to say that for some masculine observers, it heightened their admiration, as we mentioned before, and I think you were just about to speak to that. 10:01 Erin: I love the use of the word swain in that sentence. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. 10:10 Wes: What is a swain? Like a pirate or. 10:12 Erin: No, it's a male. It's a young attendant on a knight, I think, and also a male suitor. So there's something quite knightly and courtly about that word. And then, of course, the sentiment or the action that the narrator imagines them wishing to do, pressing their lips to this mysterious hand is itself quite gentlemanly and courtly. Right to kiss a woman's hand, only this one is on her cheek. So that's what I think. I also was interested in with the fact that it is a hand. There's a sort of, you know, mise en abyme quality where we have this image of the hand nested within the cheek. So the gentlemanly or the courtly thing to do would be to kiss a lady's hand so that you stay. You express reverence for her and affection for her, but at arm's length, quite literally. Right. And that is then moved up close onto the face. So it seems to give permission to get closer or to think about her in more sexual terms, more intimate terms, whatever that may mean. And their fantasy of kissing it the way that they would a hand is only a fantasy because they couldn't dream of getting that close to her. They couldn't dream of kissing her on the cheek in this day and age, they would only be able to kiss the hand. So there's a duality there that seems to unite courtly, idealized love with sexual passion or intimacy, which doesn't have to be sexual intimacy, but a real closeness. And so it seems to me to be like this perfect symbol of a wonderful, respectful, intimate and yet respectful kind of relationship to her, which only. Only certain men can appreciate. But that. That sort of duality, I think, is involved in this idea. It's. It's a hand, but it's your face. You know, a knight would only ever kiss a hand. 12:02 Wes: It's really interesting, this idea that her magical endowments have come from. Some fairy has touched her cheek when she's an infant and given her these magical endowments, one of which the ones that sway hearts. So we assume her beauty at least, which is interesting because in that sense, there's an irony in the fact that she's got this birthmark which bothers some people and. But that her beauty, the rest of her beauty, which is very pure, comes from that. And then the other endowments would be personality. And the things that I've called character before, certain quirks, certain charms, certain things that are very, very specific to her and her character. Things that are endearing, things that someone might react to the feeling of endearment in the same way that she reacts to his scientific journal thinking. It's adorable. In that sense, the hand is almost like a belly button for character in a way. It's like as the umbilical cord is severed and we're left with that kind of aperture, that's the necessary mark of our having been created in that way, being a product of reproduction, but is also sort of like an incompleteness. Right? We haven't been fully sewed up somehow, you know. And so it gives us some sense of the cost of her beauty and character and other charms of character. And that includes, it turns out, as the paragraph proceeds, Envy. Right. From other women. And then they can point to the. You know, they can enviously be satisfied with this idea that the hand has ruined her beauty. 13:47 Erin: Yes. And in fact, we're told explicitly that had she been less beautiful, this birthmark would not be a problem. Right. So that too seems to be about the effect of the birthmark on the beauty and either as a particularly distinguishing mark or as something which is said to mar. And the fact of her being so beautiful also seems to have that kind of double edged sword quality to it. So that the mark is the response to it, is the same in a way as the response to beauty. I like what you're pointing out about the magical quality of it in this fairy origin. And I just wanted to point out too that Aylmer's science is repeatedly characterized as magic. Right. There's a connection between the fairy hand and what Aylmer seems to do for a living. Seems like the wrong. Seems like the wrong terminology. I don't know how he's making any money or what he's doing, but, you know, he calls himself a sorcerer. He says not to look in a sorcerer's books. When he shows Georgiana the time lapse flower, she cries out, it is magical. I dare not touch it. It seems like a lot of what he does is in fact Gob Bluth. Like party tricks. 14:58 Wes: Yeah. 14:59 Erin: So it's funny that he, you know, it's funny that this thing, which has the local reputation for being a kind of a result of magic, is one which the local magician wants to eradicate. Maybe he doesn't want competition from a fairy, I don't know. But it's funny that for all of this scientific advancement, the effects and it seems the purpose of a lot of this have a very distinct connection to the magical or the fantastical. 15:25 Wes: Yeah, well, it certainly is. It's magical thinking. And there's an element of desire for omnipotence in that. Right. To just have complete control of the world with one's mind without having to do anything but cast a spell, let's say, or to imagine what you want to happen and have it happen, or to have this fancy poison that can kill tyrants at a distance. And so that's where the magical gets this crossover into the technological into the scientific. They become hard to distinguish if the technology is powerful enough. But he makes a scientific project of getting rid of the hand on her cheek. And I think, however we interpret the hand, whether as character or as humanity and materiality, or sexuality or instinctuality, which all these Things. This type of project is actually quite common in relationships. In a more subtle way, people are trying to do this to each other. To iron out the quirks of the other person's character. For instance, to get them to behave in a different way. Or to regulate the sexuality of the other person. Especially men with women to basically exercise some degree of control over the love object. So that it conforms to their wishes. So that it does what the love object should do for them. And there's a whole discussion there which we don't have time to have. That discussion is around, well, what do we want from the love object? What are they doing for us? Because some of it is about intimacy. And not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of confiding and seeing and being seen. And being seen. Which significantly involves sharing one's affective life. Sharing these irrational elements of the self. And showing these non generic particular characterological parts of oneself to the other person. And then seeing oneself through the way they see you. So that your self knowledge, your knowledge of yourself and your sense of your own existence in a way are predicated on that intimacy. You're getting some of awareness of yourself through the reflection of the awareness of the other person. So that's the ideal way to do this. And it involves a certain amount of respect for the particularity of the person and for their character. But one might want to kind of enslave the other person, right? This is what Hegel's getting at with the master slave dynamic and the phenomenology of spirit. Not just to have the reciprocity of intimacy, but to be able to say, I need you to be the mirror for me that I want you to be. So instead of me being the mirror for your particular character, I'm actually going to perfect you in the way that I need to perfect you. So you can reflect back to me the kind of image that I need for myself. This story very much speaks to that larger reality. It's a science fiction story where he's doing something very crazy. But in a sense, it's what people will are often actually trying to do to each other. To kind of wipe out some aspect of the other person that is imperfect, you might want to say, but imperfect in the sense that it doesn't perform this mirror function adequately. 18:46 Erin: I think that might lead us in nicely to Drowne's wooden image. You know, I was thinking about the magical process through which Drowne seems to create his carving of this woman. And also the deep knowledge that comes from the love that inspires the work. Right so that he's able to so perfectly reproduce this woman who we can presume he's seen and interacted with and then sort of fallen in love with that. It gives him this special kind of knowledge of her, this insight, this new. How does he characterize it? He says, there has come a light into my mind. That's how he describes it. And this light which distinguishes this carving from all of his previous work, which he calls worthless abortions. 19:35 Wes: A little harsh. 19:37 Erin: Yeah. This light has given him the ability to produce a sculpture in wood which looks like it is a real woman. And it turns out that the woman who inspired this is real. And Drowne must have come in contact with her at some point and fallen in love with her, or else he wouldn't have been able to reproduce this so well. So that kind of the magical process, both with which the work is undertaken, where we don't really see him working at it and people are really. You know, there's a lot of gossip over what he's doing. He seems to be only working at night or at odd hours. Nobody really sees the chisel in his hand, so to speak. So the sort of magic with which this sculpture comes together and also the magical power that his love for this woman, which seems connected to this insight and this real knowledge, this real intimacy with her, seems to inform the greatness of the sculpture as well. But there's a big empty space at the center of this story when it comes to his actual interactions with her. 20:40 Wes: Right. How are you inferring love? 20:43 Erin: Copley says it. This is Copley. He looked earnestly at Drowne and again saw that expression of human love, which, in a spiritual sense, as the artist could not help imagining, was the secret of the life that had been breathed into this block of wood. So love is the secret ingredient. It's love. It's love, you know, which is ultimately quite pat, maybe. You know, we get the explicit connection to Pygmalion, just as we do in Birthmark. As a matter of fact, we get a rumor that he has been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady and gazing with a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own hands had created. 21:19 Wes: Well, that's pretty obvious. Pretty clear. 21:22 Erin: Yeah. And then we get him called Pygmalion, explicitly. And then once it's done, once he's created it and it's been presumably mounted on the front of the ship and the ship takes off, he says that he wrought the sculpture in a kind of a dream. And now that he's Broad awake, he's going to go about his regular business, and he returns to his mechanical style, from which he was never known afterwards, to deviate. So it's as though a magical spell overtook him, and that spell turns out to be love. Here we go. The narrator tells us explicitly. We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old figure, the one he's working on after the fact, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken lady. Unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to circumstances, may either be developed in this world or shrouded in a mask of dullness until another state of being to our friend Drowne, there came a brief season of excitement kindled by love. It rendered him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment, left him again, the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of appreciating the work that his own hand had wrought. So love has produced this magical ability in him and the magical effect of this woman. Which seems to be alive. Who seems to be alive. 22:43 Wes: Well, we assume she's not the first beautiful woman he's run into. 22:48 Erin: That's a good point. 22:49 Wes: But he's supposed to be the most. I don't know. Is boring the right word? 22:54 Erin: And dull. 22:55 Wes: Dull and creative, but not particularly talented or inspired or passionate about what he's doing, which is a. I'd say he's a craftsman. 23:06 Erin: Craftsman, as opposed to an artist. 23:08 Wes: Yeah, right, right. I wouldn't characterize the average craftsperson as necessarily dull. He seems to be going through the motions. Right. 23:17 Erin: I just mean. Yeah, yeah. 23:19 Wes: No, I wasn't saying. You were saying that. But he's going through the motions. So when a person like this gets animated by something or inspired by something passionate about something, it's quite a contrast. There's almost like a comedy to it, when a person like this kind of comes to life, so to speak. Right. And of course, there's a direct parallel to the idea that this carved figure in the wood has come to life, as it seems to the townspeople that it may have done, or to the life that he's breathing into the wood. But it's a peculiar form of inspiration is all I'm pointing out, because it seems to be predicated on the specular. Right. It's love at first sight. He just sees her. Or at least that's what we're left to infer. It's not like he was hanging out with her. 24:12 Erin: Yes, exactly. 24:13 Wes: Watching Netflix, getting to know her, going out to coffee. She. She turns out to be a Portuguese lady of rank. So they're definitely of different classes. And so then naturally the question is, okay, well, he's seen plenty of ladies of rank. And what was it about this in particular? Not that I think the story necessarily answers this, but what about this woman in particular was so inspiring? 24:40 Erin: This is one of the mysteries for me, because, in fact, when we get descriptions of this woman, I mean, what in these descriptions stood out to you? There's the expression on her face, but then also I feel that the narrator is mostly describing her dress, her hat, the flowers in her hat, and her, you know, in other words, all of her accessories and her clothing rather than her, you know, we actually get very little of a physical description of this statue. And then when we see her real life counterpart, there's a sort of catalog of all of the items of clothing and the jewels and all the things that she's wearing that correspond to the statues. And that's sort of how we know that she is who she is. And then we say, you know, she also wore this expression, but an expression, too, is something you wear. We do get, I think, dark eyes and something about the mouth, but we don't. I don't think we even know what color hair she has. You know, she's sort of a blank in the middle of the descriptions of her finery. 25:46 Wes: You know, he does say there's a light vivacity and sportive mischief written in her countenance. This is the loving, the living version. She was observed to flutter her fan with such vehement rapidity that the elaborate delicacy of its workmanship gave way and it remained broken in her hand. Wait, is this the statue or the woman? Well, both. 26:11 Erin: Both, because that's another thing that. 26:13 Wes: Yeah. 26:13 Erin: That lines up where the fan breaks in the real woman's hand and then soon drown, is seen to be fixing the fan in the hand of the statue, which has somehow also become broken. So it's like they share the life force or something. Or there's a voodoo doll quality, only in the reverse direction. 26:35 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. And here's another. I'm just trying to get at some of the character of her character that comes out on this. The face, with its brilliant depth of complexion, had the same piquancy of mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the countenance of the image, but which was here varied and continually shifting, yet always essentially the same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain. On the whole, there was something so airy and yet so real. In the figure and withal, so perfectly did it represent Drowne's image that people knew not whether to suppose the magic wood etherealized into a spirit or warmed and softened into an actual woman. So I think this. Yeah, this idea of a kind of mischief is repeated several times, and I think it comes up in the description of the. Earlier on in the description of the sculpture. Is the wrong word. Right. What's the right word? 27:29 Erin: Carving. 27:29 Wes: So, you know, as you pointed out. Yeah, most of it is about what she's wearing and the kind of an illustration of the skill that goes into it. Because he captures all these subtleties. I'm trying to look for the place where he. If I can find another place where this mischievousness is mentioned. 27:49 Erin: Yeah, this is when they're describing how people, when they entered, felt impelled to remove their hats and pay such reverence as was due to the richly dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to stand in a corner of the room with oaken chips and shavings scattered at her feet. I love that at the end of that paragraph, we get. And then her face in the dark eyes and around the voluptuous mouth. Okay, the voluptuous mouth. That's the descriptor. The mouth gets. There played a look made up of pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea that the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing admiration of himself and other beholders. 28:24 Wes: Right. So pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness. So, yeah, who wouldn't fall in love 28:30 Erin: at first sight, I suppose, though. And, you know, we do get that this is a beautiful woman, but. Yeah, it just. It just occurs to me that we get so much description of. Yeah. The expression she wears, the clothing she wears, the hat she wears with the flowers in the hat. And maybe. Maybe a lot of that is supposed to express how masterfully the carving is done in that in wood. He's been able to recreate all of these different textures. And, you know, because then the real woman is wearing fabric and a diamond on her finger and gold around her neck and a hat with flowers, you know, and so the fact that Drowne has been able to capture all of these different materials of vastly different quality is part of the magic of the image, it seems. But maybe this speaks to what you're talking about when it comes to character. So we. So rather than telling us that she was, you know, she was 5, 7, and she weighed. She weighed 135 pounds and 36. 29:32 Wes: 24, 36 measurements. 29:35 Erin: Exactly. And she had an oval shaped face and almond eyes and whatever the case may be. 29:41 Wes: And she was into horseback riding, walking on the beach and. Yeah. 29:45 Erin: Pina coladas. Yeah. So she. So instead we get actually this sort of satellite description or things which are suggestive of her taste in this sort of roundabout way, rather than her vital statistics, shall we say. And that ultimately produces this image of singular realism, transcendent realism. And I think this is why I was thinking of Drowne in the middle of our conversation about Birthmark when you brought up this idea of character. Because it seems that Hawthorne is getting at something here about negative capability. Right. Because we have Drowne's other wooden carvings all having that family resemblance, as he calls it, where they all look like they're part of the same wooden family, and that they all were created by sort of like Drowne is the father and Wood is the mother. And they look, you know, like a combination of the two. Not that they look like Drowne, but they look like something created by him. So they bear almost like too much of him as a paternal influence and also too much of the material. Somehow they haven't been transformed enough that it requires one more touch to take them from being, as Copley puts it, to take them from being wooden figures to being lifelike. We're also told that he chooses subjects which are often symbolic or allegorical in some way. He chooses, say, the female figure of Britannia. This is colonial Boston, we're made to understand. So he chooses an admiral. And on entering the shop, Copley looks around and it says he glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory that stood around on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part partook of the stolid transformation. So he has all of these wooden images, literally wooden and figuratively wooden images of types and allegories and generic figures. And somehow, through expressing the character of this woman in particular, which has largely come out in her dress and in her expression, which are things which are maybe not essential to her. Right. He really captures, like, a real life woman, so divorced from his kind of parental influence and just herself, without, almost. Without any kind of. Or the appearance of any kind of intervention on his part at all. Do you see where I'm drawing the connection to negative capability? 32:20 Wes: Yeah, this is really. This is really great. Yeah. So negative capability, right. As Keats put it, it's this ability to live with the unknown. With uncertainty, with doubt, without irritably reaching after facts and reasons. And that's the kind of capability that artists need. I mean, in Drowne's case, he's too wooden and too literal, let's say. And this again reminds me of the part in the. In the birthmark where pictures aren't just about verisimilitude. They have something that, you know, like a little hand imprint on them. They have a little characterological mark that makes them something special that allows them, let's say, maybe to communicate the affective part of our existence, to communicate feeling as opposed to just. To communicate fact. So science is very different. Right. So for Aylmer and the birthmark, science is about the generic rather than the particular. And I'm sure this might be. Someone might argue with this. But science is all about reaching after fact and reaching after reasons as opposed to art. So in a way, Drowne is very much like. Or there's some similarities to Aylmer, but he's trying to do wood carvings as if he were a kind of scientist. Or he's like one of these artists you see online that try to show you how they can get picture perfect quality using pencils or whatever. 33:50 Erin: I'm sure you've seen videos online. 33:52 Wes: Yeah. There's this confusion that the height of artistic ability is about complete verisimilitude to fact, when in fact one is trying to get at something underneath. I called it affective life, or maybe you could call it spiritual as well. So the very thing that. That Aylmer is trying to do with science, which is to squeeze spirit out of matter. Right. Art, in a way, does that. It takes its medium and squeezes something spiritual out of it in a way that science can't. 34:26 Erin: Yeah. And Drowne's different relationship with this particular subject matter, which the narrator is calling love, is about letting things be exactly what they are. That is something, of course, that Aylmer is incapable of. And therefore he doesn't really love his wife. I mean, I think that's. I hope that was something we. We could take away from. From that conversation. Right. He doesn't actually love her. Right. He loves. He loves himself. He loves his idea of what she should be in his mind, which has nothing to do with her. 34:58 Wes: He loves her as the subject of a scientific experiment. 35:02 Erin: Yes. But I think he loves her insofar as. As she corresponds with what he thinks she should be, which is to say he's in love with himself. Right. That's sort of, at bottom, what idealization is. It's not about the other person at all. It's about your idea of him. 35:16 Wes: Yeah. The idealization is about creating, like I said, creating the mirror. That will help you with your own idealization of yourself, or at least help you with the kind of identity that you need for yourself to avoid feeling like you're going to fall apart. 35:30 Erin: Right. 35:31 Wes: Whether that identity is, you know, obviously idealized or not, it's always tainted with that for various reasons. But, yeah, so, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Getting so you could say, you know, I said he, as a scientific specimen, to the extent that he can make an experiment out of her, he loves her, which is the same thing. Right. The scientific project just is to create the ideal. 35:53 Erin: And Drowne is taken up with this woman in a way that seems to suggest real love. He sees her for what she really is and is able to reproduce that. Or he's captured something fundamental about her and is able to reproduce who she is as she is to the extent that people can't tell the difference between this carving in her. And so that part of that seems to involve letting her be what she is without him changing anything about her to suit the carving. Right. Which is why this is a sort of anti. Mirror image of the birthmark. That seems to be the thing that Aylmer is unable to do is accept Georgiana as she is with the birthmark. You know, so there's a. There's a creativity that seems to imply this perfect collaboration with nature rather than Aylmer's criticism or, say, edit of Nature. You know, I think he has a critical stance towards Georgiana rather than a creative one. And what's interesting about that for Drowne is that he's working in a natural. I mean, this would be the case if he were working with stone, too, but he's working in a living. A natural and living property for his sculpture. It's not marble, it's wood. So it was formerly, at least alive. And so one would say, well, what's the difference between. Is there a significant difference in, say, trying to edit the birthmark off of Georgiana's face and trying to edit the piece of lumber into a statue? You know, what. What would be the. The substantive difference between those two things and what we're told? Made me think of that apocryphal quote of Michelangelo's where he says something like, I saw the angel in the marble and set him free. Something along those lines. He almost certainly didn't say that, but he said something else which is related to that, which is just about how every block of stone has a statue in it, and he just has to let the statue out or cut away all that is not statue. Right, Right. Something along those lines. A similar sentiment is ascribed to Drowne. The narrator says it seemed as if the Hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to remove the strange shapelessness that had encrusted her and reveal the grace and loveliness of a divinity. 38:16 Wes: She's like a dryad. Is that the right spirit freeing from the tree? 38:20 Erin: So that seems to me. I mean, so the difference there would be. I mean, of course, there are many differences other than the one that I'm pointing to. It's not like Georgiana is just some block of wood that he's just taking a little piece of bark off of or something. But it seems to imply a desire, the desire of this wood to be a statue in a strange kind of way. But another way of saying that is just a collaboration with nature. So he's working in tandem with his materials to create something new out of them, which is imitative of nature in a way that is respectful and admiring and which is not destructive or claiming ownership or something along those lines. 39:08 Wes: Yeah, you're reminding me of Aristotle, actually, believe it or not, who famously creates this analogy between the artist and nature because they both involve form and they both involve reproduction. So in nature, the form, it's in the. And he's thinking of biological creatures, it's in the. In the animal and the functioning of the animal, the form of the animal and all of its metabolic activities and so on. But it's also something that can be transferred from one generation to another, and we now know it as DNA. So the DNA in the animal corresponds to the artist's conception, or he's thinking especially of craftsman. What replaces the DNA in art is the conception or the plan in the mind of the artist, and then that's transferred into matter. In both cases, the form has to be put into matter. And in nature, what makes it nature is just this ability to provide itself with its own form and do it spontaneously. Right. The acorn, you don't need drowned to come along and turn the acorn into a tree. It does it by itself. And it's very suggestive of. The teleology of. It is very suggestive. Right. So for the ancients and medievals, right. It was a slam dunk case for the existence of God. There were other cases to be made as well, but this type of self Generating activity lent itself to an intelligent design theory where God had to be the ultimate artist. But the reason why I'm thinking of this is that I think you're. This idea that you had of the medium or the matter sort of calling out to have form put into it. Yeah. It made me think of the spontaneous ways in which, in nature, matter can just take on form without the intervention of an artist. But it also made me think that the artist must somehow respect the wishes of the matter or the medium and not do violent to it, let's say. Which I think fits with negative capability. Where the violence would be to. Part of the point of negative capability is you don't put messages into your art, for instance, or you're not moralizing, let's say. Which is kind of funny because Hawthorne was famously an allegorist, in a way, or he's accused of that. But you're trying to respect the truth of things, but not the literal truth of things, like I said, the psychological or affective or spiritual truth of things, and communicate that without doing the violence that the artist can do. And the violence just. Yeah, it comes from the more manic quality that Aylmer represents, in a way. I think it comes from the impulse to idealize too strongly. I think there's some of that there for the artist. But it has to be somehow tempered. Otherwise you get whatever the result is of the person, the manic person who thinks that they're a great artist and they hand you their manuscript, which is absolutely terrible. Doesn't reflect the. You know, it's not as good as they. As they think it is. So it. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm connecting negative capability to the resistance to this impulse to idealize and. Right. Hawthorne says science can mend or mar, but cannot create. But art can create under the right circumstances. 42:42 Erin: Right. The removal of the birthmark seems to me to be the editing of the DNA. Right. So the birthmark, we might say, is an expression. It is literally and figuratively a symbol for the expression of one's genetic code or all the properties that make you you. And the idea is to capture those properties rather than to edit out the ones that we don't like and only portray the idealized person. Because I think the result of that would be pure allegory. So maybe we can say that Hawthorne does allegory one better or something like that. He's not quite there. 43:23 Wes: These stories worked very well together in a way that I hadn't actually anticipated, but. Yeah. 43:28 Erin: All right. 43:29 Wes: Thanks for recommending them. 43:30 Erin: I love Hawthorne. I could do 40 more. Not really. 43:35 Wes: So I think next time we're going to do One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then Julius Caesar and then I don't think we have a plan after that yet, but yeah. All right. 43:45 Erin: Thank you, thank you and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

The short stories we cover in this episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on Nature’s design by removing a birthmark from his wife’s otherwise-perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. “You cannot love what shocks you,” the scientist’s wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin discuss two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The short stories we're covering in today's episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on nature's design by removing a birthmark from his wife's otherwise perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. You cannot love what shocks you, the scientist's wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What's the difference between collaborating with nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative rather than the critical faculty? Today we're discussing two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Birthmark and Drowne's Wooden Image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I thought we would start with the Birthmark, which I realized is one inch away from being an episode of Frasier. I don't know if you're a Frasier fan, but I feel like this kind 1:52 Wes: of setup, I used to watch it, but. Yeah, tell me how that works. 1:55 Erin: Frasier is a perfectionist, you know, obsessively high standards. And I feel like there are a lot of these episodes where he wants to host a dinner party in his apartment or Niles wants to host a dinner party and some tiny flaw becomes their obsessive quest to fix. And then they spend the entire episode just dealing with the cascading problems that trying to fix this one little flaw causes. There's one where I think they're trying to move the father's recliner out of the living room so they could have a dinner party, and they drop it and they create a scratch on the floor. And the next thing you know, there's a team of guys who are rewiring the whole apartment because of all the, you know, the floorboards are coming up. I think at one point in that episode, the Father says something like, not everything has to be perfect, you know? And Frasier is like, that kind of attitude is what leads to shag carpeting. So. So, anyway, I'm. I suppose I'm making a connection to the fixation on the flaw, though how we might characterize. Is it Aylmer? When I say that, it sounds like I'm saying Aylmer with a deep Southern accent, so I don't. Aomar. 3:05 Wes: Yeah, well, it's a really different story if you imagine them both having thick Southern accents. 3:10 Erin: It's very different. 3:12 Wes: Aylmer Geddon here. Well, his claim to fame was he invented the glue. Right. Badoom poom. I was going to ask you how we're pronouncing. No, I looked up the name at some point, and then I've forgotten what the significance of the name is or what its provenance is. Is it biblical or is it. 3:31 Erin: I only found the high priest over there. His cellmate, Whatever. 3:36 Wes: Ahmedabad. 3:37 Erin: Yeah. Ahmadinejad, whatever his name is. Ahmed. 3:45 Wes: I say we bomb her. No, no bombing. Just gonna. So we don't know how to pronounce Aminadab. 3:53 Erin: Aminadab. And, yeah, like, if. 3:56 Wes: We'll call him Aylmer. 3:57 Erin: Aylmer, as in what ails you? You know, I'm assuming. 4:00 Wes: I guess so. 4:01 Erin: It's anyway, not a great name, but Georgiana isn't much better, so. 4:05 Wes: Oh, you don't like Georgiana? It's pretty fancy. 4:09 Erin: Yeah. 4:10 Wes: Just like her boudoir. In comparison to his crappy laboratory. 4:15 Erin: Well, he knows how to put a lot of effort into interior design. When put in the service of science, he puts in some effort. Anyway, I wonder what their dates were like. 4:28 Wes: So I reminded myself of the meaning of his name. It means noble, famous, renowned. It's from Old English, which makes sense, right? Because he has made himself famous, almost getting to the roots of life and getting to the point where he might be able to create life. Or. That's his claim. That's what he boasts. But it turns out, as Georgiana finds it, he does a lot of brilliant things, but he always fails to reach that aspiration. Right? To combine to make science do something spiritual, to make science, to kind of squeeze life or spirit out of matter, which would be the ultimate form of alchemy. That's his ambition and he fails to do that. But I guess that allowed him to get a woman. I love the line in here about just the very brief description of the way they get together, where he. What is it? He washes the acid stains off his hands. 5:27 Erin: Yes. He cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. 5:37 Wes: There you go. Persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. Yeah, that's such a great sentence. 5:43 Erin: It is a great sentence, but, yeah, he's put in all this trouble to come unstained into the marriage and it's like, what does she bring to the table? 5:52 Wes: She couldn't have washed her cheek, right? 5:56 Erin: Come on, Georgiana. The entitlement. 5:58 Wes: When you're talking about Frasier, it made me think of Seinfeld, where he's always rejecting these very beautiful women because of one little quirk or another. And one of them, she has. There's like a woman with large hands. 6:10 Erin: Yes. 6:11 Wes: She's very beautiful. And then you get to see these close ups, and obviously they have a man standing in and you just see these man hands. That's the one fatal flaw that he can't accept. So if he were Aylmer, you would be. Yeah, I'm just gonna resize your hands. Aylmer is like the original plastic surgeon in a way, but, yeah, she could have ended up with looking like a really bad plastic surgery case. Huge lips and just a bad facelift. 6:45 Erin: They call that Mar-a-Lago face now. 6:46 Wes: I thought I. Right, Mar-a-Lago face. I thought I'd do a few other touch ups when I went in for the birthmark. So she suffered a better fate than that. But in any case. But I bring that up because at a certain point, Hawthorne points out that many men found the birthmark to be a kind of cute, quirky thing. And you could think about this in terms of human character as well. Often when people were attracted to each other or fall in love with each other, they find all the little quirks, including the things that they're later on going to find to be flaws and to be things that drive them crazy in the beginning. They find them to actually be charming. So it doesn't just have to be a birthmark on the face. It could be any quirk of character. And I thought that was interesting because that's the kind of thing that we think of as chemistry. It's the kind of thing that creates a chemical bond between people. Right. A strong bond, as opposed to them just being in proximity to each other. Like in a colloid. You mix things up and they could be a colloid, as my high school science teacher would say. They're just there hanging out together, but they don't react chemically. They don't create something New. But when people have chemistry, they come together, like the way hydrogen and oxygen come together to create water. And they create something entirely new by forming chemical bonds. But to do that, they have to be attracted to each other. And to be attracted to each other, they have to. Or maybe not, maybe have to is too strong. But often there are these little quirks of character. And so the kinds of bonds that they create. It's not like hydrogen and oxygen, where you could give generic scientific laws about what the attraction is and why the bond forms. People are sui generis in their characters, in the way they're unique, like a fingerprint. They don't belong to some general type, so their chemical reactions are that way too. They don't happen according to some general law. But in any case, the thing that can bring people together and bond them can be the thing that later on creates friction. And in the case of this story, it becomes a lot of friction indeed. Although Hawthorne doesn't say that he in particular, that Aylmer in particular was attracted by the birthmark. He says that after they get married, he starts to get concerned about it after it. 9:24 Erin: Talks about the series of reactions that this birthmark inspires. Says masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw after his marriage, for he thought little or nothing of the matter before Aylmer discovered this was the case with himself. 9:45 Wes: Right. Okay, so this. This is exactly the passage I was looking for. Yeah. So men either thought it was charming or they wished it weren't there, but Aylmer just didn't pay attention somehow. 9:58 Erin: Yeah, he thought little or nothing of it before their marriage. So he's taken her on somehow with this sort of indifference. I mean, he's selected a beautiful woman to become his wife. And it seems as though he's taken, in that sentence that we read earlier, you know, more care in preparing himself for something like the wedding day than he has in selecting this woman. I mean, it turns out that they really haven't had a chance to develop any kind of chemistry with each other because he seems to know her so little. Like, over the course of trying to remove the birthmark, he gets to know her character much better than he did previously. And she turns out to be a pretty astute and interesting and noble person, which he is discovering along with us, the reader. So it seems that he has selected this woman for the mere fact of her desirability without really Understanding anything about her and then over the course of trying to get rid of the mark, learns what makes her great. So for me, the birthmark isn't so much a sign of her, say, quirk or character flaw. The fact that he doesn't notice it until after their marriage, it seems to me to give an indication that this is really about him. Of course this is. I actually made a list or a log of all of the possible interpretations of the mark that come up over the course of the story. I think the most compelling of any of these, I mean, you know, we have this idea that it's a sign of her own mortality and that this is something which is distasteful to him because he's involved in, you know, the scientific experiments which you've already talked about, of wanting to sort of best nature or manifest spirit in matter. And therefore, this sign of mortality is an affront to him. So it seems to be speaking to him or responding to him in a very particular way. And one can also say it's a representation of himself somehow, that he doesn't notice it until their marriage because he, in a way, manifests it through the marriage or something. I don't know if that's taking things a little too far. 12:02 Wes: If we were to approach this with a hermeneutics of suspicion, right, in particular Freudian one, we would say, well, of course he noticed the birthmark, and of course it played a role in him getting with her. He just wasn't conscious of that. And we can speculate, right, he wanted a project. He wanted someone to tinker with. He couldn't create life. But as Hawthorne will say, at a certain point, science can't create life, but it can mend it a little or mar it. And then we have to ask the question whether he really wants to mend or mar. But, yeah, at a conscious level, this is what's so great about the. You know, he married, he found a beautiful woman. How does he put it again? 12:46 Erin: I can't even persuaded a beautiful woman. 12:49 Wes: Yeah, persuaded a beautiful woman to marry him. So, yeah, a beautiful woman runs entirely against the whole quirk of character thing that I was talking about. So she's just a beautiful woman. And any beautiful woman will do, in the same way. To go back to my chemical analogy, for any oxygen atom, any two hydrogen atoms will do when they come together to make water. It's not personal. It's very impersonal. And in this case, it sounds very impersonal, even though she has this very unique personal quality about her. And presumably has many others. So it makes it sound as if her particular character were not that much, whether physical or spiritual, mental was not of that much interest to him, except that she be every certain very generic type, beautiful and probably of good breeding and whatever the other criteria are. And the main question, I think, from this wonderful first paragraph was whether a woman could compete with his love of science and then how he would integrate her into that type of life. At the very beginning of the paragraph, it sounds like who, not long before our story opens, had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. So the spiritual affinity for Georgiana. Right. But by the end of the paragraph, his love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two, but it could only be intertwining itself with his love of science and uniting the strength of the latter to its own. So we start out with the spiritual affinity being more attractive, and then by the end of it, it's a three way. Science is not going to lose out. They have to all come together as a threesome or it's not going to work out. 14:45 Erin: Right. Well, this is, I think, giving credence. I think we're kind of both pointing to the same thing, which is the idea that he either unconsciously chose this woman specifically with this birthmark, or it somehow manifested as a result of his being married to her, where suddenly it seems to him to materialize because it's a way to keep her at arm's length. I mean, we might imagine that the hand is his hand sort of pushing her away. I get a strong suspicion of his impotence in the story. And we do see, later on she 15:18 Wes: can just say, talk to the hand 15:20 Erin: and then just turn her cheek. 15:21 Wes: Talk to the hand 15:24 Erin: that is tr. I think he's doing that to her, though. 15:26 Wes: Right? Right. 15:27 Erin: You know, we see his fingerprints actually make a mark on her arm when she's gone in to look at the part of his laboratory that he hasn't turned into that crazy magical boudoir. He grips her arm and pulls her away. He's gripping her, but only to take her away from him. So again, there's a kind of like this push, pull dynamic where it seems to be about needing her to be a problem to be solved and therefore keeping her at arm's length. The birthmark is some sort of perfect excuse to register disgust with her at the very time that they should be. I mean, and the story even calls it, you know, the very time that they should be closest. He has this perfect excuse to recoil 16:09 Wes: from her the symbolism is very clear. And if it weren't clear, Hawthorne just tells us during the story what the birthmark means. So it has something to do with her mortality and her physicality and her imperfection as a human being. And we can also speculate with her sexuality, with her instinctual nature rather than her higher spiritual nature. All the things that are associated with being a physical being and menstruation, if you want to get very speculative, the sorts of things that a young virgin. Well, just kidding. Who knows? He probably saw some prostitutes before he got married. Right. I don't know how things worked back then, but he's dating it to be about in the 1700s. Right? He says in the last century. 16:58 Erin: Yes, that's right. 16:59 Wes: In any case, he's experiencing, living with a woman for the first time and coming to terms with her humanness, including her physicality. And there's the sexual attraction component of that. But then there's also the discussed repulsion component of that. 17:17 Erin: Well, we're also told that he is spirit and his assistant is matter. So, you know, we know he has problems with embodiment. Right. So, yeah, we're given a lot of interpretive help here, though I think that there's something about the plural interpretations provided both by the narrator, because there are. You know, we could splinter them out a little bit. I mean, there's an interesting part where the narrator calls it the fatal flaw of humanity, which nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. So from that, we could extract three different symbols. It's a symbol of mortality. It's a symbol of imperfection, which, again, we could say is maybe a subset of mortality. But it's also the symbol that perfection can only be earned somehow, and earned via suffering. So I think the narrator is actually giving us a few different interpretations. And I think that the very idea of interpretation that this mark is assigned to be interpreted seems to suggest there's literally more than what meets the eye here. I mean, it turns out, of course, to tether her. To tether her spirit to her body somehow. It's like a knot that's tying her soul together with her flesh. But I think there's a great deal of amateur semiotics going on just among the townspeople. Ultimately, Aylmer's discomfort with the idea that this mark has the potential of multiple interpretations is part of what makes him want to eliminate it. Right. Like, I think he's disturbed by how polysemous. I don't know the mark on her face is. And he wants to have the answers, and he wants to have the. To eliminate the possibility of a knowledge which he doesn't have access to or doesn't want to understand. Right. I think, again, this is a lot of. This is kind of just repeating what you've already said. Because I think this might be just his confrontation with a woman that is outside of his experience and which he may not have any kind of model of understanding. 19:31 Wes: Yeah. This is another way of saying that he's interested in the generic because he's interested in scientific law. And he's interested in a beautiful woman as opposed to this particular woman. And this is why he's making the contrast to character. And the idea that this is not something Hawthorne gives as an interpretation. It's my own, but that somehow the birthmark is kind of like a characterological thumbprint, but made visible. And it goes as deep as life itself. Or it extends all the way to the heart, I think, is the dream that he had. And she overheard him talking in his sleep about it. So the seemingly superficial thing and character often manifests itself that way in certain sorts of behaviors, even as subtle as body language and facial expressions, vocal tones, all of it. Just think about all the ways in which people express character, you might say, and gender is one form of that. So think of femininity as a form of character. One can always make the accusation, oh, well, that's just a role. That's all very superficial. But there's a sense in which I think that's wrong. Because character is also about dispositions to think and feel and behave in certain ways. Virtues like courage are examples of character, but so are pathologies like being a narcissist. That's a certain type of character. There's an outer facing aspect to it that one might say is superficial, but there's also inward part of it that has to do with the experience of the person, but also the identity of the person. So it does go deep as life itself in that sense. And to eradicate what seems to be superficial is actually to eradicate the person as a particular person. In a way, he's at war with particularity, which I think goes towards your point of wanting a single interpretation and be in the realm of the generic, of the universal, as a scientist might like to be, as opposed to being in the realm of the truly sui generis, the thing that can't be subjugated in any particular scientific law. Because each person has their own set of laws. Each person has their own science to them. I could ascribe a lot of character traits to you, but in the end, the only legitimate description of you as a character is just to say you have Erin-ness, right? You are Erin. The rest of it is only a very, very rough approximation. And interestingly, there's a point where Aminadab Hawthorne makes the point of saying Aminadab is very comfortable with all the particulars of things. He's about doing all the precise things but doesn't know how anything works. And I think Elmer is a big picture guy. Aminadab is the. Elmer is the ideas man and Aminadab is the one who executes. He's the worker. So that sort of lends itself to this point as well. And then there's another little piece of evidence where when Aylmer is creating these bewitching scenes using science, but it seems like magic, right? He's giving her these little figures dancing around in the air. Or he shows her. It's almost like a hologram, I think, or a three dimensional movie. But he's showing her representations of actual life and very, very accurate representations. Representations, but they still have that bewitching, indescribable difference that makes pictures more attractive than the original. And this again is, I think, about character. This is something that art does, right? You don't just want. It's not just about doing an exact picture perfect representation of what's imitated. It's about capturing the uniqueness of what is imitated by capturing difference. And the uniqueness of the thing imitated can't be captured by perfect representation of the original. Because in a way that only gets at the generic in a weird sense, I'm not explaining that very well. So I think all these things go together. 23:57 Erin: No, I think you're right. I was thinking about. I mean, we'll get to this in Drowne, but the extent to which particularity actually can transcend itself because Drowne had me thinking about negative capability, I suppose. And would the elimination of these types of particularities be something to be wished on a certain level? Is character something that we have to transcend? And I think ultimately what Drowne provides as an alternative to that is that it's through the particulars or through the character that you get at some sort of universal truth, right? There's the family resemblance of his. Of his wooden carvings, which are less than the masterpiece that he creates, which seem to be particular in a way that is different from the kind of particularity that we're talking about again, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, so maybe I shouldn't leave that alone. But I think your reading is absolutely correct. I love this idea of her particularity and her character being expressed through the mark. And I think to your point, you're reminding me of the moment where she's invited to touch the flower, that he's sort of created a time lapse, you know, the holograms or whatever. You know, I just think, like, oh, it's movies. You know, Hawthorne is such a genius. He's like predicting. He's predicting movies and cinema. And he also has, you know, this flower that's created via a sort of time lapse photography where we watch it, you know, grow suddenly and quickly out of the soil into a full, full grown flower and invites Georgiana to touch it. The narrator tells us she had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leave coal black, as if by the agency of fire. There was too powerful a stimulus, said Aylmer thoughtfully. So even he kind of gets it right. It's not that she's sort of tainted with this birthmark and she's a sort of manifestation of original sin or of death or any of these things that we might say are these sort of garden variety interpretations, but in fact, her power, her characterological power, her distinctness, gives her so much vitality that she causes the plant created in this lab environment, this false plant, this simulacrum, to wither under her touch. 26:13 Wes: You know, the plant is living its entire life and fast forward. So in a matter of a minute, maybe, I don't know how long exactly. So we know it's about to die, and he thinks that she's going to have a chance to pluck it and smell it before it withers and before its seeds start already creating the next generation. It's all going to happen that quickly, and then it withers right after she touches it. And so we don't know whether that's. 26:40 Erin: Oh, that's a good point. 26:41 Wes: Correlation or causation. But of course, he's going to go straight to causation, like a bad scientist. He's not going to say, oh, maybe it was a coincidence, but it was too strong a stimulus. Which is an interesting thing to say, right? In light of him as a stimulus to her. Right. There's a little story being told there, I think, about him and her as well. You can reverse it as well, and she can be in the position with the stimulus and him in the position of the one being Stimulated. But there's two ways to read it, and I think on one reading, it's him destroying her with too powerful a stimulus and maybe wanting too much to control her or perfect her. 27:22 Erin: That's good. Yeah. How do we square all this, then, with the fact that she's converted by him over the course of the story? I mean, part of this is just, you know, if we wanted to pathologize this relationship, he's just subjecting her to endless amounts of psychological abuse to the point where she. She hates the. The birthmark more than he does. He seems to convert her to a mindset which values the generic over the particular. Because ultimately she characterizes love as something generic and thus loftier than reality. So we're told her heart exalted while it trembled at his honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. So, you know, I mean, it's. It's winking at us as it. As it tells us this, right? But she comes to appreciate his love, which is one of demand and idealization rather than satisfaction and acceptance. So she's converted. 28:30 Wes: Well, it's interesting. Yeah, the conversion is a very interesting thing, because you would think the opposite would have happened. Because before all that happens, right? She witnesses him trying to show off. He does the airy figures and the fast flower, and then like a daguerreotype type of photograph that captures only the hand, and the rest of the face is out of focus. Hawthorne says, in a way, these are all failures, right. In each case, something has gone wrong. I forget what happens with the airy figures, why that would count as something going wrong. But in any case, after that, it's like he gets manic almost. He's. He does more showing off. He comes in with this powerful fragrance. Now he's like a perfume guy. It's like your friend who's doing a different career every different day and who thinks he's going to be great at it. And then he's got a crystal globe with poison in it. And he can kill any tyrant anywhere with that poison somehow. And then there's a cosmetic for freckles, but that remedy, that's too superficial, he's got for her problem. He can't just give her this cosmetic and have the hand go away. He needs something deeper for that. And then she reads his books and finds out that it's all about failure compared to his lofty standard, which is to make science do Something spiritual to create life or something in that domain. And the upshot of that, after reading his scientific journal, is that she trust his judgment less, Hawthorne says, but she reveres him all the more. That's the interesting way that she gets converted. She knows, in a way that he's doomed to failure in this project, but it's the thought that counts. 30:24 Erin: Yes, A for effort. 30:26 Wes: Yeah. She's impressed by the loftiness and the purity of his goal, which is really sick. Right, because he wants her to not be human. And that is a thing with men. Right. Freud's whole thing about the Oedipus complex was predicated on this idea of a Madonna whore complex, where men essentially want to idealize women as maternal figures and they don't really want them to be human and are bothered by it, are bothered by women's sexuality, are bothered by women's physicality, bothered by all these things and want to perfect them by turning them into spirits, basically, which just means killing them, ultimately. So it's a sick kind of project. But somehow she thinks, well, isn't that sweet? That's the wrong thing to say. Isn't that noble? Isn't that noble? 31:22 Erin: Well, he's succeeded in making life so untenable for her that she looks forward to the prospect of his failure as a way out. She's willing to. She expressly says that she's willing to die because life has lost any attraction for her so long as she has this birthmark. 31:40 Wes: She says something really interesting there, which is that she's like, yeah, go ahead and I'll drink this, but honestly, if it kills me, I prefer that. But the reason why is because she's become so morally advanced, she's become too good for this world. From her own perspective, she says life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Wow. Conceited much? Just kidding. But yeah, she. She fully identifies with. With this idealization and says, yeah, I'm too good for this world. 32:20 Erin: Well, in a way, she knows she knows more than he does because she's then, by that time, read all of his experiments, seen more clearly than he, I think, is capable of. How idealistic and out of whack his aspirations are. So if you like, maybe this has put her into a kind of a maternal relationship to him. She gets him now. She gets what he's about. She's seen his failures and, you know, he's. He's become like a little boy to her, and she's going to play his little game of make believe they're gonna play toy soldiers with a real gun or something like that. 33:02 Wes: That's interesting. So you don't think she really buys in? You think she's just playing along? 33:06 Erin: I don't think she's playing along. I think that the insight that she has now to him, I don't think she lies at all or that her perceptions are called into question throughout the entire story in the way that his are. And I think, yes, here we go. Who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Exactly what degree that is, she doesn't quite say. She says, were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured, hopefully. So she, she's, she's quite accurate in her assessment. 33:40 Wes: Yeah, I've misinterpreted that. Yep. 33:43 Erin: And I think, I think she's absolutely right. I think that by turns she's revealed herself to be more sensitive and perhaps even more intelligent than he. And I think having seen this, this record of his life, it's as though she's gone through his, his. You know those baby books where you record, where parents like record all of their kids accomplishments and you know, they said this word on this date, you know, when they were 10 months old or whatever, you know, and they take the stamps of the baby's feet, you know, and have the footprints and the handprints in the book and just a log of everything that they've done. 34:20 Wes: And you say that's adorable. 34:23 Erin: Exactly. It's his experiment book. It seems to be a record of his mind up until the point that they married. And now it's like she knows him. She knows him really well. And she knows him in a way which, you know, she's then able to, with this sort of like perfect sense of balance and accuracy, gauge how she's able to respond to that. And it seems to me that she pities him or decides that she's just going to die to please him or something. It seems to me to become very maternal. 34:58 Wes: Yeah, I'm not so sure I agree that she's dying to please him. I mean, I think this is very important what you've pointed out, because her degree of moral advancement, it's not like she thinks she's become an angel. Right. She's advanced enough to be too good for this world, but not enough to withstand the dissonance that her goodness now puts her in, in relationship to the world. That's the way I would say. 35:23 Erin: And to him I would say, yeah, yeah. 35:26 Wes: And then methinks I am, of all mortals, the most fit to die. So there is a grandiose element to that. But she's most fit to die precisely because she hasn't been perfected enough. She's been perfected enough to be put in a spot, but not perfected enough to be able to endure the predicament that she's been put in, by the way. Most fit to die, or fit to die. That should have been a James Bond movie title. Fit, Fit to die. I think she's attracted to the loftiness of his goals and the sort of tragic loftiness of his goals, their unobtainability. Let's see, when she reads his volumes. And at that point, she realizes he's already kind of drugging her, doing things to her without telling her. She starts out by reading. There's romances, there's poetry. And then she gets into these alchemist figures who she realizes are kind of ridiculous. They think they're going to change metals into gold and all that stuff, but they also think they're going to create life and do the thing when we haven't talked about this yet, but really that only women can do but use science to arrogate for themselves this kind of reproductive capacity, this capacity to actually create life. Or you could say a divine capacity to create life. She kind of thinks it's quaint. They falsely imagine themselves to have sway over the spiritual world. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed and perhaps imagined themselves to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. So, yes, also the subjection of the spiritual to the scientific in the material, and then moving on from there. Right. He's recorded every experiment in this book, this journal of his. And so here's her reaction to the book. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them, yet spiritualized them all and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp, the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with less entire dependence on his judgment than heretofore. I love that. Less entire dependence. Meaning, yeah, she realizes he's whacked. She can't rely on his judgment. He's whacked out but there's something admirable about it. 38:07 Erin: Yes. And this is where I get. I'm glad you pointed to her reaction to his library. And this, I think this is where I'm getting this maternal idea coming in. You know, she's now seen everything he has to offer, and she's in a position of judgment over him now. And it seems like. Yeah. You know when kids show you something that they've done and you're like, wow, that's great, honey. Good job, you know, that's wonderful. That's really cute. Oh, you want to kill me now as part of this game that you're playing? Okay, I guess. I mean, you're a huge disappointment. So what do I really have to live for? 38:46 Wes: If it'll make you feel strong and powerful. Okay, go ahead and. 38:50 Erin: Exactly, exactly. 38:51 Wes: That's what you need for your self esteem, honey. 38:54 Erin: Right, right. And the key to this, I think, is dropped in very early on when she says, you cannot love what shocks you. What I love about that. I ended up doing a little bit of reading into galvanism and things like that because I figured out what. What the early part of the story was referencing with this idea of the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of nature seem to open paths into the region of a miracle. So I was reading about galvani sending the electrical impulses through the frog's legs, Right. And getting them to twitch as if alive. And how, I guess Mary Shelley had been just reading about that in the run up to the contest there in which she wrote Frankenstein. So I was thinking about just the great duality of that line. You cannot love what shocks you. Right. It works both ways. He can't love her and recoil at her, and at the same time, he is shocking her, so to speak. Right. He's making her the recipient of his experiments, his efforts at improvement. His critical gaze, you might say. Right. And I think so long as he is treating her like an experiment, or so long as his relationship to her is one of this desire for improvement or one in which he's somehow tinkering with her, I think the relationship would not survive even if she survived and the experiment was successful. 40:18 Wes: Right. 40:18 Erin: Because it just. It's creating this. This relationship of scientist and subject. It's creating a relationship which I think is untenable in any kind of a marriage. And I think that that's one of. That she knows or realizes that she knows at the point when she decides to die. There's no way back from this. We could say that there's no way back from him treating her like a science experiment. And maybe there's also no way back for the relationship so long as she realizes that there's something ridiculous and like a little boy about him. And they're always going to be unequal in that regard. So somehow the inequality has now gone in both directions to such an extent that the marriage can't work, can't go forward. Not that it was working before, but, you know, it's really broken. 41:08 Wes: She realizes she's just married to this unemployed crackpot. 41:13 Erin: Well, you know, the most shocking part of the whole story is finding out that he was actually respected in Europe. 41:19 Wes: You know, I mean, he's famous. It's important that he's famous in this. 41:23 Erin: Right? It's. And it's dropped in. In the middle that, oh, by the way, he was actually famous for this stuff because for a long time you think that he's just, you know, he has his, like, toy science kit that he got for Christmas one year, and he's just been. Been playing around and I guess independently wealthy enough to have a, you know, an assistant who's. Who he's paying to do his. His amateur science experiments. But turns out they're real. And though also a lot of this was undertaken a long time ago. Right. There's a strange. Something weird happens with time where it seems as though he's giving up his experiments to get married. As soon as they're married, all these problems happen. And then when she's looking back into his log, she sees that these were things that he had undertaken years and years ago. You know, so there's a. Something odd is happening with time. 42:14 Wes: Yeah. 42:15 Erin: He tries to brush off his failures as though they happened a long time ago. And now he's figured it out in the same way that I should say, too. He also tells her that he's been thinking about her birthmark for a really long time, even though they've just gotten married. That's another weird time. He wouldn't have had time to think so deeply about it. It's clearly something that is just, oh, I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm sure I could fix you. Right? And it seems to happen within like 48 hours of their wedding day that he. That this thing, which he claims not to have noticed until they've been married, is something he's somehow been thinking forever about and knows the solution for. Right. So there's a time lapse with this plant and also somehow with his own sense of his Advancement in his studies, 43:03 Wes: these things that he earlier on made discoveries about. So during his toilsome youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of nature that had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in his laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the. So he discovered the nimbus cloud, apparently, and of the profoundest minds. It's good to have a little practical engineering stuff going on. He had satisfied himself of all of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano, and had explained the mystery of fountains and how it. And how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth. So he's investigated, high and low, everything from the heavens all the way down into the depths of the earth. And then it turns out he's discovered the human frame, what's in the middle. Studied the wonders of the human frame and attempted to fathom the very process by which nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air and from the spiritual world to create and foster man her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside an unwilling recognition of the truth against which all seekers sooner or later stumble. That our great creative mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, results, as opposed to the mechanisms that underlie the results. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half forgotten investigations, not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them, but because they involved much physiological truth. I love that phrase, much physiological truth, and lay in the path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana. I love the phrase much physiological truth because it speaks to the physiological truth of sexual interaction as well, which I think is partly what's underneath all this. But I do want to say, just going to. I like your reading a lot where she's kind of humoring him, and ultimately her self sacrifice is a form of maternal condescension, but she does. I just want to look at one more area where she's engaged in these rapt musings about his character. This is where I thought she fully buys into his idealization. And now I'm wondering if I'm wrong about this. In Lydia, you're reading so Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the character of Aylmer and did it completer justice than in any previous moment. This goes to your point where she's actually, genuinely getting to know him. Her heart exalted while it trembled at this honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with and earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. Yeah, so this is the part that I thought was a bit sick. She felt how much more precious was a sentiment than of the meaner kind, which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual. And with her whole spirit, she prayed for a single moment that for a single moment she might satisfy his highest and deepest conceptions. So this is. You know, I'm sure feminists have written about this as her kind of being in the male gaze and sort of going with it. Right. So trying to live up to his idealization longer than one moment, she well knew it could not be, for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before. 46:58 Erin: Okay, I love that. So one more moment seems to undo. Yeah, exactly. She's there, and then she thinks about it a little bit more, and she somehow gets beyond him. It's as though he's convinced her to, instead of loving their family dog, to love, loyalty or something. Right. He convinces her for one second to conceive of everything as being in the world of forms or something like that, and to stay up there. And then she immediately knows that nothing can stay up there and that she is never going to satisfy him, and he is never going to be satisfied. And he's just going to keep trying to climb this ladder of abstractions into the point of the singularity, into nothingness. Right. 47:47 Wes: But I do think she still is enamored of his idealism. And even though she knows she can't live up to it, and I think you're right, there's a condescension to her approach, you know, to what she does, in the end, she still finds it. And maybe it's just she finds it endearing the way, you know, as you pointed out, you might find a child's accomplishments endearing. But this paragraph suggested to me that she's excited by this idea of purity. 48:15 Erin: She's giving his behavior the most generous possible read still in this paragraph. But, you know, it's about virtue. Is what I'm trying to say. She sees this as the pursuit of the virtuous, that there's something in the generic, in the dissolving of character. If we all are just these spirit beings and we are untethered to our bodies, we can all live perfectly virtuous lives and everything will be okay. So I think she sees his aspirations perhaps as having a virtuous intent here, and then in the next moment realizes that it's also wholly impractical and that she can't follow him there. And she's trying to understand what he's about and what attracts him to this, even as she appreciates its impracticality and ultimate folly. I suppose it's not just about trying to fix her so that he could finally touch her or whatever. It's about an ideal of virtue. I don't know if I'm. If I'm characterizing that correctly or I'm just sort of thinking out loud. But in other words, she thinks of him less as a critic in this new insight that she has into him and more of a pure idealist. And the latter she seems able to appreciate and admire, even as she understands how silly it is in practicality. 49:36 Wes: Well, yeah, I think she's kind of fatally attracted to the impracticality in a way. But over time. Let's wrap up part one and part two. We will continue our discussion of the birthmark, and if we can have time, we'll get to the other story, Drowne's Wooden Image. [email protected] subtextpodcast or just subscribe right here on the Apple Podcast app if that's what you're using to listen. Otherwise, you'll hear the second part in a week. All right, thank you, thank you. 50:24 Erin: For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.” For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of There Will Be Blood. We spent a long time in part one talking about Daniel and his psychology and his relationship with oil and that symbology. And I think now we're about to move into his relationship with HW and the way that that might triangulate his relationship with oil a little bit or his relationship with himself maybe, and redemption that that might represent for him psychologically, which ultimately doesn't pan out. This is another reason why I think I like Daniel as a character to a point, is that his scenes with HW before the accident are very sweet. I mean, except for when he's actively deceiving people and just using HW as a prop in the background. I should have mentioned this first thing. Have you seen the SNL There Will Be Blood excuse for Bill Hader to do an impression of Daniel of Daniel Plainview? 1:29 Wes: I probably saw it, but I don't remember it. But it sounds great. 1:32 Erin: It's so good. You gotta. I'll send you the link as soon as we're. As soon as we're done. But it's just he has a show on the Food Network where he goes around drinking other people's milkshakes at various. And Amy Poehler plays H.W. in the underrated performance of that episode. It's just that she's in the background with these huge eyes and she says nothing and just has the sort of like silent, you know, look on her face. This is a funny look. I love that episode. And Anton Chigurh is a guest on the. On the show. 2:04 Wes: Oh, wow. 2:05 Erin: So he also, like, kills somebody with a cattle gun. Anyway, so they have a surprisingly, I think, tender and wonderful relationship which. Which would seem on the surface to sort of belie Daniel's own stated principles and behaviors. But I think this gets to his. To the ambivalence of oil, which is Daniel's own ambivalence about origins and a desire for connection and a desire actually for support. As he says to Henry later, I can't keep doing this alone or I can't keep doing this by myself. Something like that. So he needs a prop at all times for being Mr. Self Made Man. He usually needs a prop. 2:47 Wes: I guess his business partner gets killed at some point. When HW is what, two? 2:52 Erin: Yeah, one or two. Yeah. 2:54 Wes: He has the boy from a young age and he's a single dad. Yeah, I think you're right. There's a lot of sweet moments. And again, I think it represents a possibility for redemption. And I think he, you know, if HW hadn't been injured, you could speculate that there would be a different course for Daniel, that he might have. It's possible that that relationship could change him. But they lose. Their ability to communicate is significantly impaired. That's one problem. So HW's ability to actually affect Daniel and to produce any change in him is compromised. And then the other problem is I don't think Daniel likes weakness. And that's what the deafness in HW represents. And then there's the guilt. Right. He's embarrassed. Well, there's guilt and embarrassment. I think he feels guilty about what happens to hw, or maybe. But at the very least, he doesn't like how it looks. Right. So that the conflict he gets in with those other businessmen, potential business partners, is about the idea that he's not taking proper care of his family because he sent HW off by that point. Right? 4:12 Erin: I think, yeah. 4:14 Wes: So there's the implication that he didn't properly take care of his. Of HW and hw's getting injured. And then there's the implication he's not properly taken care of him by. Or that he's abandoned hw. And those two criticisms. Or that criticism, sorry, really, really bothers him. And then so we have to ask why it bothers him. Is it really part of his identity to seem to want, to seem caring to other people? I don't think so exactly. But yeah, how do we explain that? Why is he bothered so much by HW's injury and by this criticism of abandonment? 4:52 Erin: Does abandonment imply an abdication of duty or being unequal to a challenge? 4:59 Wes: That second one, I think sounds right to me. Weakness, maybe. 5:03 Erin: Yeah. So HW becomes quite a sticking point then. You're helping me see that with him. He's a symbol of weakness because he's. Because he's. 5:11 Wes: Deaf. 5:11 Erin: And therefore Daniel might become someone who's pitied for having a son with a disability, but without him, he's also accused of not being able to handle it. So HW can't exist for Daniel at all. His very existence becomes something which is inherently going to cause problems for Daniel. Now. 5:32 Wes: Yeah. Can we say more about the deafness thing. And why that's such a big problem? Because he's really cruel about that. Towards the end of the movie, flapping your lips or. No, what is he saying? Your hands. 5:43 Erin: Sorry. And your little dog talks for you or whatever. 5:47 Wes: You're beneath a bastard or worth. 5:50 Erin: Bastard in a basket. There's so many. So many lines that I just like that I say so many times, and that's one of them. 6:04 Wes: I would love to see the outtakes from that. 6:06 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 6:07 Wes: Yeah. 6:08 Erin: No, Bastard from a basket. That's what it is. Bastard from a basket. So this is the flip side. So I think that in Daniel's universe, he wants to get rid of the idea of luck. I think I'm then tweezing luck from a gift or something like that. But anything which is not the result of work, maybe anything which you might luck into or which might be given to you as a gift, Daniel hates Daniel, doesn't want any part of it. And I think what happens to HW actually proves the existence of luck, namely, like the existence of bad luck. It proves that things can happen to you that are not the result of anything that you've done to either deserve punishment or earn praise or Reward. Right. Because H.W. is up there. Because he is kind of following his father's example by tending to the derrick. Right? He's. He's sort of like, you know, I had this idea that. That Daniel is like this shepherd of oil derricks, you know, and you could say that that's kind of what HW is doing. You know, they're all waiting for the oil to come in and sort of watching. And HW is up there, you know, like a. Like a shepherd lying in the grass in some kind of pastoral painting, only he's lying on the roof of a shed in a sort of like, hellscape in which nothing. He's not doing anything wrong. He's not. He just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So that's proof of a force outside of the forces that Daniel wants to acknowledge. Eli, of course, will connect it to the fact that the well wasn't blessed. And then we have, I think, what Daniel is about, which is about playing God and being a creator. So I'm going to reject any connection to things that were given to me that I didn't necessarily earn, including a family. But, like, I will turn someone who isn't family into family. I like, I will make them my family member. And it's very important that he does that. Absent of a woman. Because that would involve collaboration. So this is sort of like this Shakespearean idea of, you know, the perfect print of the father without the intervention of the woman, which can be hairy and difficult for instances of paternity and stuff like that. Right. So Shakespearean characters are very interested in the workaround for that. So the idea of a perfect self. And the only way that Daniel knows how to be himself is through this rhetoric. Right. And so he teach it. We see him teaching H.W. telling him, here's what we're going to do. This is earthquake oil. So HW can no longer be a perfect copy of his father because Daniel can't reach him anymore. Because Daniel's not interested in becoming a different or a better person or a person other than what he is. And so that lack of communication means that Daniel would have to change and that HW can no longer be a perfect copy created by Daniel in his image. 9:08 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. I think that you're reminding me of how sweet that transition into the third act is with HW is getting signing lessons at the end of the second act, and then Mary is doing that with him, which is very sweet. Right. Daniel is not. So there's already love there. And then you jump into the third act is them getting married. So there's a big time transition as well. But there's something that is like, for me, was the most emotionally impactful moment of the movie. And there's love in that. And I think maybe this is part of the problem with hw. You could say Daniel has done a really good thing by putting HW into a community. Right now he's used him and used this idea of community to get what he wants and to serve this envious project. But he really did all these things. He really did irrigate the land and help create a community and also give HW a community. And that, I think, has been formative for hw, and it's given him a possibility of love where there is none for Daniel. So my point here is that by the time we get to the end of the movie, then this all happens very quickly. Right? It's sweet. He's married, and that is just horrible. But HW has been formed by forces which are more than just Daniel. This is going towards your point with printing and all that. So it's not just about that there's no woman imprinting on hw, but also that there's a competition for the communal forces. And I think that's what unconsciously would gall someone Like Daniel, HW is more than his because he's the communities. And HW is loved and can be loving, and that's not a possibility for Daniel. And in that sense, because of those things, HW can be an individual who's not just an extension, an extension of Daniel. So it's sort of a narcissistic appendage. And that's what's represented by HW saying, I am off to Mexico with Mary and I'm gonna start my own business. And that makes him a competitor in Daniel's mind. But I think in Daniel's mind, any individual is a competitor. Anyone who's not an extension of him represents a competitive threat. So H.W. has escaped his orbit in various ways. In the external action, the escape comes with, I'm going to go to Mexico and start my own business. But psychologically, the seeds of the escape are already there in the fact that he's got these communal opportunities and opportunities for love. And ironically, of course. Right. Yeah. Daniel puts HW into that very position. So his project of exploitation goes wrong there because he's. By making use of community, he loses control over this one person that he had a relationship with and that, you know, where the relationship was happening under his. On his terms, which is complete control. 12:24 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I just want to tease that out a little bit more because I'm thinking about the fact that he first puts HW into the community of Little Boston, giving him the ability to write, to meet Mary, the person he will marry. And then the deafness because of that lack of communication, it forces HW into a reliance on people. Right. So he ends up going. And it's. This is done so subtly and skillfully in the film, but we sort of know that the school he must have been sent to must have been a Catholic school or at least some kind of high church school. Right. Because H.W. and Mary are being married in a much more traditional looking church. Right. So we can sort of imply, intuit that the school for the deaf was one, which is probably a Catholic community. Right. 13:11 Wes: There's not any snake handling that's gonna happen. 13:13 Erin: No, I don't think so. I think. 13:16 Wes: Get out, devil. Get out. 13:19 Erin: Well, you know, I think that the film is obviously very suspicious of both Daniel and Eli. The cult of personality church, that is Eli's church, you know, in. In Little Boston, Sunday doesn't mean Jesus, it means Eli. Right. So he's gone into the, you might say, you know, the most community community of all the communities. Right. The. The Catholic Church. The one in which there is an extremely structured idea of communal responsibility, of charity, of, you know, one which would. Develops a social doctrine, etc. So I think that, you know, I was thinking about, well, why. Well, why is Daniel upset at the end that HW is going off for himself? And why does he construe him as a competitor? Why would he not admire that? Because one would think that Daniel would actually be, you know, would create the conditions whereby HW would inherit all this money and live a life of ease and wouldn't have to work. And that would be the thing that would make Daniel resent him, would be to inherit this money. But no, I think it turns out that as you're pointing out, there's a collaboration now inherent in HW's person. So he's going to be going out and using the knowledge that Daniel gave him in those early years of training in order to drill in Mexico. But he's also now been the. The feminine principle in him. You know, the mother or the other parent has become potentially the Catholic Church or some sort of like high church. Right. It could be Anglican. Right. Some sort of high church influence, which is representative of community, which is representative of the feminine, I think. And this weakness, this, this deafness which he's construing, which Daniel construes as weakness, that needs that community coming in and being the mother to this child, which means that Daniel can no longer sees him as a competitor. Because you're not my kid, you know, you're your mother's kid now. 15:24 Wes: I mean, the irony here is that HW has just kind of become a regular guy. Like, he's not, as far as we can tell, doesn't have some extreme personality disorder like Daniel does. So he's really not in that sense a competitor, some raging narcissist who wants to take over the empire or something like that. He's not little Trump Jr. Or something like that with all the same personality pathologies that's going to compete with him in that sense. So competitor, in a way is a rather. At the external level is a rather weak accusation. But psychologically it's spot on. Right, Because HW has bested him. He's got a more mature personality than Daniel does. He's a bastard in the sense that he's just not completely fucking insane like his father. 16:14 Erin: Right. So how can we square this with Henry? I mean, I think I want to make sure though, that we talk about the fact that Henry represents an alternate vision, maybe. Of what? Of how Daniel might make copies of himself in the world. I think Henry is this possibility that Daniel hadn't considered, which is, if he's my brother from another mother, that's important. I think maybe he is like me, through the father, through whatever paternal forces Daniel imagines have affected him and his personality. Perhaps Henry could be the same way, coming from the same place, under the same conditions. But having moved away like this is important, too. I think he's had this long journey to find Daniel. So both of them have moved away from Fond du Lac, which I know means bottom of the lake. So it's about water. But you can't think of Lac, Lac and Wisconsin and not also think of milk. Right. So they've both moved away from a kind of maternal force, which is also like the. You know, water is also, of course, a maternal force as well. So I think it works both ways, but they've both moved away from that. So I think that's another possibility for him. Of course, the deception and the idea that Daniel has been made a fool of in having been deceived by Henry makes this a very different kind of family lease than the one in which he was deceiving the child, HW or other people into believing that he was the father of this boy. Daniel can't be made a fool of. So Henry has to die. 17:49 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting. He comes right at the midpoint of the movie. So it's another redemptive possibility. It's another possibility for some kind of actual relationship for Daniel. But then we quickly see that. We see that HW Intuits that there's a way in which Henry might supplant him. And so that's how you get, you know, he lights that fire. I think part of it, he's. He intuitively understands that Henry is a fraud. And I think he gets into the diary. It's a little vague for me, but you get the sense that he's. He's on to Henry in a way, but also knows that. Right. HW has been Daniel's entire life. And now here comes Henry, and that's exactly what happens. Right. Henry is then sent away. And then Daniel and Henry have their little bromance road trip, surveying for the 18:40 Erin: pipeline, which returns them to water, briefly 18:44 Wes: ending up in the ocean, splashing about like having gale time in San Francisco. Is that where they are in San Francisco? 18:53 Erin: I think they're a little further south, barking up the wrong tree there. 18:58 Wes: I guess it's rather stale to point to the homoerotic element of that, but, you know, de rigueur for criticism, but. But anyway. But it's probably a little bit legitimate to point that out and to point to the fact that it ends in violence partly because of that. But really, when all one needs say is that Daniel allowed himself to get too close to Henry and that's why Henry had to die. You know, again, there's an external line of action that justifies it. And in a way, Daniel is sort of let off the hook. Right. He has an excuse to kill off Henry, but I think that that's his fundamental impulse anyway, is to do that sort of thing, to get rid of that relationship. But in any case, Good news for HW. Well, his rival is gone. 19:45 Erin: Yes. But HW's relationship with Daniel is over. And then. Yeah, so that might have been a redemption and I think Henry might have been another one. Not as effective. But, you know, Henry makes him open up. 19:57 Wes: Exactly. 19:58 Erin: Returns him to water. Returns him to the possibility of connection with other people. Even if at the same time he's saying, I probably couldn't look at that house again, it would make me sick. He talks about the Peach Tree Dance. He actually talks about being with women. Right. He actually is suddenly open to water, to the possibility of collaboration with somebody on the basis of a family tie. 20:20 Wes: Henry is the one. He tells about his envy, he's confiding all these things. And as you said, it's the only time in the movie where we get any of Daniel's inner life through his interactions, as far as I can tell, with Henry, any sort of self. Actual self disclosure. So it is significant, it is redemptive to some extent, or it goes in that direction and then of course goes sideways. 20:44 Erin: Right. And what's so fabulous about that is that it's the exact same scenario as hw, only this time Daniel is not in control. So he's ceded a little bit of control to these forces outside of himself under Henry's influence, and then discovered that Henry was not actually his real brother and cries. He cries. That's important. 21:04 Wes: Yeah. When he discovers this, he has a fair amount of control because he. Because Henry relies on him for money. And we get the info, the hint that that money is being doled out very, very by drip, by drip. Right. That happens in the saloon where Henry has to repeatedly ask Daniel for money and. 21:29 Erin: Oh, right. 21:30 Wes: At that point Daniel is furious. And so at that point in the movie, I'm wondering, is he furious because of his dislike of sexuality? Is he furious because of Henry's weakness? Weakness for women, but also the weakness implicit in Asking him for money. The dependence. And I think that's part of it. Right. So he needs dependence. He needs people like H.W. or Henry to be dependent on him. That's the only position in which he can tolerate the relationship. But dependence is also weakness, and he doesn't like weakness. So he seems to be disgusted by Henry's weakness. I guess we're supposed to also infer at that point he already knows that Henry's not his brother. 22:11 Erin: Oh, yes, he knows. 22:12 Wes: Yeah. When does he find out? 22:14 Erin: It's the Peach Tree dance. 22:15 Wes: Okay. 22:16 Erin: He says we could get all dressed up and take him to the Peach Tree Petri. Yeah, we can get all dressed to the petri dish. Petri dish. The Peach Tree Dance. And Henry clearly does not know what he's talking about. Whatever the staple of Wisconsin Fond du Lac society is, which is so funny. And this is. So this is h. This has to be a Paul Anderson invention in the script. Right. Because remember in Sierra Madre, Curtin wants to grow. Grow peaches. And then he goes off with Cody, has that peach orchard. And so he's left his wife and this peach orchard to apparently go to seed. Unless Curtin goes there and takes his place. Anyway. Yeah. So he gets this fantasy fulfilled of this wife in the peach orchard. Yeah. So that's the tell. 23:07 Wes: I see. 23:07 Erin: And it's at that moment with this idea of women and place and connection that he realizes. 23:14 Wes: I see. 23:14 Erin: Yeah. 23:15 Wes: Yeah. I think I missed that. I mean, I think I concluded there had to have been a tell that I missed, but. Right. Yeah. It's. In a way, it provides him with an excuse, probably to unleash aggression, you know, built up irritation just with having, you know, having. Being. Being in a relationship with a person, getting close, the humiliation of having confided all those things. For instance, that in and of itself, you know, is enough to make you want to kill someone. How dare you know these things about you? 23:46 Erin: About me? 23:47 Wes: How you dare you know my weaknesses. 23:50 Erin: Right, Right. 23:51 Wes: That's the way I used to feel going to. Going to therapy. It's like, did I really. Did I really say all those things to my therapist? God. Oh, my gosh, I hate her for knowing that. 24:02 Erin: I'm just. I'm. I have no boundaries and I'm obsessed with self disclosure, so that doesn't. I'm like, oh, finally, I feel close to you now that you know all my darkest secrets. Thank you, checkout person. 24:18 Wes: Yeah. Well, self disclosure is at the very essence of. Yeah. Friendship. But it's got to be regulated. 24:25 Erin: Yes. 24:26 Wes: You say too Much the other person's got to die. 24:29 Erin: That's right. I hate it. I hate it when that happens. I've killed so many people. 24:35 Wes: That's why you got to keep a little pistol on your body at all times. 24:39 Erin: That's right. Then William Bandy always finds out. 24:44 Wes: I thought we were having a good time. Remember what I told you? Never tell anyone. 24:50 Erin: Don't tell anyone. No, but, I mean, I revisited the moment where Henry comes into Daniel's life, which is a scene that I love because it's shot from so far away, so we don't see Henry up close for a very long time. Just this real distancing effect that goes on there. And he keeps asking Henry who he is, and he keeps just saying his first name. He doesn't say Henry Plainview. So he's. And there's this. This obsession, I think, with naming and names in the film. I mean, not only because the names are so, you know, loaded, but that's a really significant tell, I think. Henry. I'm Henry. You know, I'm just some guy named Henry. I'm not Henry Plainview. Necessary, necessarily. And then I'm your brother, which, you know, which could have a lot of different meanings. So in a way, he, like, almost doesn't lie to him. Of course he does. But, you know, in a sense. And then when he holds the gun to Henry's head and he asks him again, who are you? Henry says, I'm nobody. 25:47 Wes: This is a really good. Yeah. This is really interesting. Yeah. I hadn't thought of this fact that this kind of identity thing bookends the whole relationship. It starts out with this who are you? Thing, and then it ends with this who are you? Thing. 25:59 Erin: And the. The idea to, you know, the. Maybe the idea of making your name is part of this, too. You know, you think of the fact that hws father, you know, who you only kind of realize is the father after the fact. Because it's so difficult to tell in the oil who anybody is. Right. Because they're covered in the goop, which is. So whatever you want to say about that. 26:19 Wes: Right. 26:20 Erin: Amniotic. 26:21 Wes: Fungible and amniotic. Yep. Right. 26:24 Erin: And there are so many, you know, like, those accidents where you could be anybody, it could happen to anybody, and it literally happens to people who. You don't even know who they are. Right. Because they're working with you, but they're. You maybe know nothing about them. And that the anonymity of the west, which could be. Either you get a fresh start, or it could be you Die in a hole and nobody even knows your name, you know, versus, like, Daniel Plainview. I'm an oil man. 26:52 Wes: I'm an oil man. 26:54 Erin: Right. And becoming this guy with this enormous house on the. On the coast, making. Making your name in that way, identity. I don't know. There's. There's more to be said about that. Yeah. Making your name versus being given a name like Eli Sunday. Who. Who's. Yeah, who's all. Who's all about. 27:09 Wes: Good transition. Yeah. Let's talk about him getting bludgeoned to death. 27:14 Erin: Yeah, yeah. With the bowling pin, which is just, you know, love everything about this movie. 27:22 Wes: You hated violence. 27:24 Erin: Yeah, that part is. That part is, you know. Well, I mean, I was going to start with the joke that There Will Be Blood was the original title of my first book, but so I, you know, I do and I don't. I love blood. Under certain circumstances, I'm very interested in blood. So, father named Abel, twin brother named Paul. Very confusing moment. I remember first watching theater. 27:50 Wes: Yeah. I was very confused. I thought when Eli was introducing himself to Daniel that it was Paul and that they were pretending not to know. I was. And it turns out originally they weren't twin brothers. There was a different actor. Yeah, right. And then that actor was not very enthusiastic about his job, let's just put it that way, and even admitted that. But so anyway, he got fired. And then the actor who plays Eli, who's wonderful. What's his name? 28:20 Erin: Paul Dano. 28:21 Wes: Yeah. Paul Dano plays both parts, but they don't really. I don't think they draw attention to the fact that they're twin brothers. You just have to figure it out. Right. 28:29 Erin: Daniel and H.W. do give each other a look, because of course, they can't say, like, oh, we saw your brother Paul. He tipped us off. Right. 28:37 Wes: Yeah. 28:37 Erin: So it's very, very subtly handled. 28:41 Wes: It is very interesting. Yeah. So you have the one son who. The chosen one is the one who tips him off and goes on to make a fortune. If Daniel is telling the truth, apparently Paul becomes a oil man himself. 28:58 Erin: He doesn't. He just makes that up to torture Eli because he said he gave him $1,000 instead of 500 and. 29:04 Wes: Right, right, right. 29:05 Erin: I gave him a million dollars. 29:08 Wes: Yeah. There is this Cain and Abel element. Right. Am I wrong to read that into this? 29:15 Erin: No, you're not wrong. Even between father and son. I mean. 29:19 Wes: Right. Yes, of course. But I'm thinking between Daniel and Eli. So when. Because. Right, so, okay, so here's the. Here it is, from Genesis. Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil. Oil that is just kidding. Fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering, fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering. But on Cain and his offering, he did not look with favor, which is always just find so confusing and funny. But so Cain was very angry and his face was downcast and I would be too. And if God didn't even tell me why, what did I do wrong? I'm the crop guy and the brother is the flock guy. Right? We. This has got to be someone for everything. Why am I the. But anyway, it. And I was looking online like why does. Why does. It's just Googling. Why does the Lord, you know, not favor Cain? And I. I saw someone on Reddit say because that's God's prerogative with all caps. 30:35 Erin: You can't argue with that. 30:37 Wes: Literally one way of looking, looking at it. And I'm sure you know a lot more about the interpretation of this than me, but. But just from my amateur point of view, it looks a little bit like the Abel is in the position, the more spiritual position with a flock. Right. And leading. Leading a flock and doing all that as opposed to taking something out of the. Or from the ground or something like that. I don't know. So I was associating Daniel's envy with Cain's envy of Abel and you know, Daniel's envy in the general sense that we talked about, but also his envy of. Of Eli. So he envies Eli in the sense of having this position to be of being a spiritual benefactor to people. Right. To leading a flock and envious people in general, of course, in the sense of their possibility for actual connection to others. Daniel can only be connected to the ground. Others can be connected to each other. And his envy ultimately is about, you know, he thinks he needs to defeat people, but ultimately he needs to connect. And that's. That's what is torturing him. But so that's my sort of reading Cain and Abel onto this, which is the. Why I think the bludgeoning is so apt. I don't know. Tell me, tell me what I'm getting wrong or right in that. 31:57 Erin: No, I think that's totally right. I think, you know, he envies Eli in the same way that he envies women and Fond du Lac and water and. Right. Anything that he can't control or that he isn't Totally playing God over. I mean, there's so many things I could say about this. Just one of the elements that I meant to talk about with land is also the fact that land and ownership is, of course, fundamentally. There's already a kind of mental gymnastics that you have to. That you have to do with yourself to even think about ownership of land, period. Never mind ownership of land in America or in the West. Which is. Which is maybe a hint that when Eli calls himself, you know, the son of these hills, that's. That's what he wants Daniel to call him, and that having some authority to it is already kind of suspect. So, you know, they're both flimflam men, it turns out, right? They're both. They're both orators who are manipulating people and trying to get something out of people. They both have gift for speech in a certain way. So Eli sets himself up as being the inheritor of the land, someone who's connected to the place, someone who has territorial rights that supersede Daniel's, and someone who's also a son of God and also a father to the flock. And I think Daniel actually envies, come to think of it, in this discussion of Abel, Eli's father, Abel. I think he also envies Abel for having a daughter like Mary. I think this is something that Daniel is interested in. I mean, you know, you. 33:26 Wes: You. 33:27 Erin: You've alluded to this already, but when Daniel pulls the switcheroo on. On Eli and doesn't let him give the blessing of the well, Daniel himself does the blessing, right? He's. He's constantly putting himself in the position of God to Eli rhetorically. And he instead positions himself. Oh, he says Mary. He steals Eli's language and says, Mary is a proud daughter of these hills. And he puts, like, his hand on her shoulder, right? So he does this leasing thing, even with Mary leasing family members, leasing land, right? Where he's like. He then installs himself as the surrogate father of Mary and therefore grandfathers himself into the town. You know, like, I'm a member of this town, too. I'm gonna be the guy who's part of the town. Eli, I think he views the fact that he has this oil under the Sunday ranch as a gift that he's been given that he has the right to because he owns the land. And the negotiation scene where Daniel comes clean, basically, he's not just quail hunting, that I wrote down the dialogue. Eli says, we have oil here. That's worth something. Daniel says, oh, do you have someone who can drill for it. And he says, it's very expensive to drill and to get it up and out of the ground. You ever tried that before? You know, like you don't know what you're doing, you know, you moron. How much is it? Costly. And Eli says, well, our. Our oil sits right up on top of the ground. I have this gift that everyone can see. My gift of healing people. Right. My guy, like, I'm. I'm an. I'm a child of God. I'm, you know, I'm part of the body of Christ. I'm member of a church, of a family. All of these things, I think, are twinned in there. So. So Daniel says, I believe that's called seepage. Doesn't necessarily mean there's something underneath. 35:09 Wes: Seepage versus drainage. 35:11 Erin: Seepage versus drainage. Right. Yeah. Where Eli says, what would you give us for it? And Daniel says, I don't know. And Eli goes, something? You don't know? And Daniel says, that's right. What would you like, Eli? And Eli says, $10,000. And Daniel says, for what? And Eli says, for my church. I love that moment. And. And Daniel, like, has to concede. That's good. That's a good one. Because he's expecting to be answered with, for what? Like, what do you want the $10,000 for in terms of what they already have? For what? For the land and plus the oil. But instead, Eli answers with what he wants, what he's going to use the money for. So it's like an oil answer. I'm going to take this money, and I'm going to do this with it. Right. It's about getting you somewhere. But it's also a strategic answer in a way that is showing Daniel that Eli is a match for him, I think, because he can't object to it without objecting to the church. And, you know, he has to play ball with these people. And part of playing ball is being like, I enjoy all faiths. I 36:12 Wes: love it. 36:13 Erin: Depends on what you are. Are you a Methodist? Oh, that's what I am. You tell me what you are first. 36:19 Wes: Which one of these mixed nuts would you like? I enjoy all the nuts. Even a macadamia. 36:29 Erin: And so, yeah, so he. So he can't object with that without objecting to churches, churches, the church itself, like the community itself. And he's trying to win them over. And it ties a decision about a fair price up with charity. So again, we have this, you know, opposition between the two of them as being somehow about religion. And when. When Eli accuses Abel of having Squandered everything or given everything away. Abel says, I listened to his word. Right. So Daniel has this competing gospel that is in competition with Eli's, and Eli's is also kind of in competition with the gospel. But that's a. That's a question for another podcast. 37:07 Wes: No, these are all good points. It's. And you're reminding me of. Yeah, Eli does not come across very well in that scene. Yeah, it's the scene after. So Daniel has beaten him up or humiliated him and rubbed mud in his face. Right. And then he's going to do something similar to his father, take it out on his father, Abel. But we do see this dark side of Eli there, and we do get the sense that there's a little bit of Paul in him. Right. He's also after. His intentions are not pure. Even though he wants to use the money for the church, there's a fair amount of self aggrandizement in that. Most like he wants to be a cult leader or something like that. In the end, I think he seems less ambitious. You know, he's coming to Daniel for money, but he's really fallen, you know, his willingness to say that, what is it? I'm a false prophet and God is a superstition. 38:02 Erin: God is a superstition. 38:04 Wes: Right. So this is Daniel's revenge for Eli getting him to say earlier on that I abandoned my son, you know, over and over again. Yeah, it seems. It seems like Eli has quite different. I don't know what he's been doing out there. And Would you say he's trying to do a radio show? The podcast? What? 38:25 Erin: Yeah, he's trying to be one of these. Yeah, exactly. No, he's. He's been trying to be one of these faith healer celebrities, you know. Do you know the story of Aimee Semple McPherson? This is a. No, you got it. You just got to read this woman's Wikipedia page. That's all I have to tell you. It would take way too long. But basically, one of these people who becomes famous for being a kind of like a revival church, slash cult leader, slash, give me your money and I will, you know, keep performing miracles for people, et cetera, you know, the very, very earliest forms of a kind of a televangelist made popular by radio. And there was always this charismatic Protestant element to it with supposed healings and stuff like that that they could perform, you know, which is. Which is the heart of Eli's supposed gift, you know, the gift of healing. And that's one of the things I actually wanted to talk about in relation to HW but in that final scene, you know, God is a superstition that's related to luck. But when he comes into the house, he says, your. Your home is a miracle, right? Perfectly designed. And maybe, maybe he doesn't even know it, but perfectly designed to really rankle Daniel, right? Like it's a miracle. It just appeared out of nowhere. You know, you didn't do anything to earn it. That's just great way to get Daniel to already be. I mean, he's already pissed at everybody, especially Eli. But, you know, every. Everything is about this supposed communication with God, which he is special for being privy to. So in the same way that Daniel is special because he's better than everybody, he's more skilled than everybody. Eli is special because he has this gift, because he. Because God talks to him, God tells him things. But also God has mysteries and that. That causes him some problems, as he says. 40:16 Wes: I hadn't thought about this. You know, why Daniel gets so angry at him and kills him. But this seems to be spot on about. By trying to sort of attribute Daniel's success to God in a certain way. 40:30 Erin: I wonder about Eli's flexibility, shall we say, as opposed to Daniel's. So Daniel's problem seems to be his inflexibility. Eli's problem, I think, is something a little bit different from that. Even though they're sort of mirror images of each other and they interpret things according to the same. According to similarly strict rubrics of how to interpret behavior, signs, events. They're very different rubrics, but they're very strict. But something Eli says when he. When he performs the healing of the old woman or what might be whatever, you know, the performance, which is one of the things that Daniel hates about him is that he's all show. He doesn't actually do anything. Right. That was one hell of a show. But he introduces that by saying that God has given him a new way to heal or to cast out the ghost or however he. However he formulates it, that he's not going to cast it out with fire, but it's a gentle voice that God has given him. I thought that was really interesting in light of the fact that Daniel won't change his. His mode of communication. So this is what I'm relating to HW Daniel won't learn sign language. He won't be flexible in his mode of communication. And if you can't hear his message, he wants nothing to do with you. You're not somebody who. He's going to Talk to like he walks away from the town that is fighting with each other because he doesn't need it, he doesn't need the trouble. And I'm certainly sympathetic to that moment when he, when he walks out because they're all fighting over who has the rights to the land and who's gonna get more money and stuff like that. But he walks away. He doesn't try to negotiate with them. I, like I said, I see that as, you know, probably a useful tactic to walk away, but he won't try a different way in. He has his way and that's it. Eli introduces himself to us in the arena of the church as someone who is changing his voice, changing his method of approach. I don't know if that makes, if that gives him maybe something that we could say about him that is positive, that we could put in the positive column. Because Eli to me tends to be a little bit more, I mean, if it's possible, a little bit less likable than Daniel. 42:41 Wes: Yeah, he is. 42:43 Erin: And maybe that's why I think that Daniel comes out better than he does. Yeah, he's really creepy. Maybe that flexibility, maybe that's another way that he is of that he works his flim flam. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's to show that he has multiple voices, that God gives him multiple gifts, multiple ways of manifesting the Holy Spirit or whatever. But just that flexibility. I thought there's a, there's a very clear difference being established between the two men in that statement. 43:12 Wes: In the statement of, in the statement 43:14 Erin: of I have a new voice, God has given me a new way to communicate. 43:18 Wes: Interesting. Okay, so pointing to his greater flexibility. 43:22 Erin: Yeah. Is that just a tactic? Is that just part of his inflexible belief in himself? 43:28 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm, I, yeah, he's quite. Eli is quite opaque to me, actually. I mean, in the end the veil falls to some extent and he seems self serving and cynical to some degree. But that, that seems like the place to which he's gotten at that point. But yeah, I find, I find Eli opaque. I don't know psychologically. 43:50 Erin: I know a lot of people felt maybe because of the stories around that casting necessity that Dano wasn't really up to the challenge of competing with Daniel Day Lewis. But I think as time has gone on, people have admired that performance more and more. And now I think it's, I think he's the equal of Daniel Day Lewis in the film. 44:11 Wes: Absolutely. 44:12 Erin: But it's, but it's Just such a very different kind of performance, too, which is, I think, like, really essential. It's so much more obviously about performing, though. Daniel is too performing all the time for these communities, at these public assemblies, et cetera. But I did want to say that that opening scene with the silver mine, you could say, is very evocative of the film industry as a symbol. Right. He's in that really, really dark shaft, and then he comes out to the blinking, blinding sun, and there's something of, like, coming out of the movie theater with the, you know, silver. Silver screen. It's 1898, so, you know, the infancy of films, the silver screen as a term I looked up and it says descriptions of a silver screen used in the presentation of films as early as 1897. So right around that time. And I think that drive to keep producing new things, that oil symbology is very much connected to art and the idea of, you know, sort of a dissatisfaction, always needing to be working on something. Maybe the sort of, like, egomaniacal tendency that it takes to be a film director, maybe. So a lot of. A lot of statements might be made there, but yeah, a lot of the film is just about. I think it's about sneakily, about performance and maybe about movies, too. And that, at least in that early scene. 45:35 Wes: Interesting. Okay, well, I think that is a good final word. 45:39 Erin: Okay, thank you. 45:41 Wes: Thank you, 45:45 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters at subtextpodcast. Com. If we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic, rather than communal, ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.” For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he's earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic rather than communal ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Today we're discussing Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film there will Be Blood. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, when I had suggested that we watch this film, I was having trouble deciding between this one and no country for Old Men, which came out in 2007, which filmed in the same place. I don't know if you read about the story where the oil derrick burning down, that whole scene was actually causing problems for no country because they were filming so close together that the smoke was getting into the no country for Old Men shots in the background. And, you know, I know there's a lot of conversation about these two films being possibly the two greatest films of the 21st century so far. So I was wondering which. Which you think is better. 2:12 Wes: Hmm. Well, it's been quite a while since I've seen no country for Old Men, so I would have trouble saying I don't remember no country for Old Men well enough. 2:21 Erin: As much as I love There Will Be Blood, I think actually I prefer no country, strangely. But I thought this one would be, in a way, more fun to talk about. I mean, did you look at all at Oil, the Upton Sinclair novel? You know, this is, I guess, a bit more of a free adaptation, or it's just an adaptation, really, of the first hundred pages of oil. Not an adaptation in the way that no country is of its source material. 2:47 Wes: Yeah, I did look at Oil and it's loosely based on it departs pretty quickly. 2:52 Erin: But, yeah, so I thought. I thought, in a way would be easier to do because I think with no country would have to be continually looking over our shoulder at McCarthy if we were to just cover the film. But I don't know. I mean, the older I get, the more I like, the more I like There Will Be Blood. And I do wonder if it's actually more fun to watch. Like, the performances are so fun to watch, and it's so funny. But I don't know if you would agree if you found this particularly funny or what's your experience with the film, because I've seen it now quite a few times, including just recently on the big screen, which was great. Art House theater was running it. So about a month ago, I saw it on the big screen for the first time since it came out. What's your experience? 3:34 Wes: Well, it had been so long since I had seen it. I only had one memory of the film, and that was a memory of Eli killing Daniel at the end. 3:45 Erin: Oh, whoa. 3:47 Wes: I think I reversed it. 3:49 Erin: Wow. 3:49 Wes: Imagine coming with a gun and killing Daniel. So I think, you know, when I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant. Like, it didn't have the huge. A huge emotional impact on me. And I think that's because of the darkness of the Daniel character and the fact that, Right. He doesn't change very much, except that he just sort of drills in, so to speak, into his existing character structure, which involves a lot of envy and anger, and just deepens it and deepens it and deepens it. You know, it's almost. I was just thinking, now, is there something tragic about it? I mean, he's sort of. You know, I wouldn't call tragic in the sense that he's very focused on achieving this destiny of his, which is to kind of flesh out his envy, as he puts it. He's an envious man. He's angry. He hates people. He wants to get away from people, to have enough money to get away from people. And that's his project, and that's what he does. So there's no redemption. There's little hints of what might be redemptive, for instance, in his relationship with his son. But it always goes sideways. That, for me, subtracts from the. Or it doesn't subtract from the emotional impact. The emotional impact is just unpleasant. 5:08 Erin: You know, you don't admire him at all, though. I mean, I'm interested in the idea. This idea of envy. 5:13 Wes: And, I mean, he is very handsome. I'm just kidding. 5:19 Erin: I just looked at you with disgust. 5:21 Wes: He's got a good. He's got a good job. Oh, you don't think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome? 5:25 Erin: I think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome. I think Daniel Plain Lewis. Daniel Dayview. Daniel Days Inn, the hotel magnate. 5:44 Wes: That's great. 5:46 Erin: I think he's a little oily, actually. No, I mean, that whole opening sequence is. You know, you're on his side at first. That whole opening sequence is so incredible. I love that. You know, almost no dialogue and just him and the silver mine. You've got to admire him. 6:04 Wes: No, so I look at all that retrospectively now in terms of his larger project. Yes. But in the beginning, he's someone who is willing to put all this physical work and also to sacrifice life and limb, potentially. And he hurts his leg, of course, and has a permanent limp from it. To do what? To get rich, I think. And I. Yeah, you have to admire the sort of determination, I guess, in a way. But one of the very early scenes is of him prostrate in that office as another person is counting the silver for him. And it's a very nice visual image of the idol he's sort of bowing down to. He's prostrate before this project of becoming rich, and he's made lame by it. 6:54 Erin: Yeah, you know, it is about getting rich. Right. But I think there's also something deeper at work there which maybe speaks to the idea of oil. You know, I know we talked about gold in our episode on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And of course, we also have silver here as kind of a foil foil to oil. I think getting rich for Daniel might be proof of a kind of competence or dominance, domination, but it's. It's almost a kind of a side effect or. Or proof of his success on a business level. So I think that that's why when he gets rich, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore. Or he's ultimately hobbled by that more than he is hobbled by, you know, the work itself, though literally. That's not true. But, you know, this idea of being envious. I mean, he also needs people. You know, I was thinking about the setting of the film often and the fact that it starts so relatively late in the history of Western expansion, you know, so we have. We have a person who hates people, who sees other people as competition, and yet who also has to build his entire business model around rhetoric and manipulation and sort of selling yourself and your qualifications to an audience because you're not Just one man out prospecting in the middle of nowhere. You have a continent filling up, so you have land already owned by people. You know, you have the Sunday family, for instance, on their ranch that they own. And we have people, you know, like. Like the camping trip is such a great symbol of this, right? Like the fact that Daniel takes HW On a camping trip. That's their excuse. You know, they're camping and quail hunting, so they have their little packs on their backs. That is so interesting to me that we are now at a point in time where you could be going out in California just on a camping trip and not because you're a pioneer who's doing this because of, you know, some kind of compulsion to move into the west or for necessity, maybe. So we have this, you know, immediate confrontation here between this lone oil man and a lifestyle which. Which is about kind of not really being part of the community. And then the most successful of those oil men are the ones who can bridge that gap with society, I think. And obviously, this is why HW is so important to give the appearance of the family business. So. So he needs them, and he's sort of reliant on them. And part of his skill is about this manipulation, both the rhetoric and ultimately what that comes down to is lies and strategizing in a way that kind of is using and manipulating people. That ambivalence, that envying them but also needing them, goes right to the heart of his character. I think it's why he's ultimately so obsessed with family, why he becomes attracted to the idea of Henry, his brother. Because I think there's something that Eli has that Daniel is actually quite attracted to, though he doesn't maybe see it that way. 9:52 Wes: Yeah, his motive. Right. So I said, you know, getting rich. He's focused on getting rich. And yet there's another motive that goes beyond that, and that is, you know, I've called it envy. So these are the lines from the movie where his brother says no. He says to his brother or his supposed brother, are you envious? Do you get envious? And this, by the way, is one of the. Maybe the only time we try to see him confide in someone or get them to confide in him. So there's almost none of that in his life. And then Henry says, I don't think so, no. And then Daniel says, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. Henry says, that part of me is gone. And then he says, work and not succeeding. All my failures have left me. And then Daniel says, I just don't. I just don't care. And he says, there's times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone. What'll you do about your boy? I don't know. Maybe it'll change. Maybe it'll change 10:57 Erin: Daniel Plainview. We have to do that. 10:59 Wes: Maybe. Yeah. I don't know how to. 11:01 Erin: I'm an oil man. 11:03 Wes: There you go. That's great. That's a great impersonation. 11:06 Erin: I do so many lines from this movie. He completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy. 11:17 Wes: That's great. So there's that central. So he knows, right. He's not someone who doesn't know that part of himself, that envious part of himself. Now, one might say, well, what he really envies in others is the capacity to connect. It's actually capacity for some sort of community. I think that is the part that he doesn't quite know about himself. But otherwise he's very conscious of his envy. And he has a certain project which is to dominate people because he hates them and to be able to maintain some sort of distance from them. And, yeah, as you're pointing out, he uses the idea of community to sell himself. And he sees this little boy that he's adopted as just a means to an end. But it's not entirely cynical. I think we get hints of the fact that this relationship, it's a real relationship in the end, he doesn't fully connect with hw. His temperamental hatred overcomes that connection in part because in a way, his pride is injured by HW's injury. He can't deal with the fact of that injury. And that's a pivotal moment in the movie where any redemptive possibility in that relationship is lost at the very moment that he's hitting oil kills off the redemptive possibility of that relationship with hw. But the other important thing that you're pointing to, I think, is that he puts himself in the place of being someone who can provide for a community. Right. So he's in Little Boston, Right? There's no bread. Let's look at his speech real quick. To my mind, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon a loaf of bread as a luxury. We're going to dig water wells here, and water wells means irrigation. Irrigation means cultivation. We're going to raise. Raise crops here where before it just simply wasn't possible. You're going to have more grain than you know what to do with. All right, so this looks a lot like Jesus, you know, one of Jesus's miracles. And he's put himself into direct conflict with Eli here. Eli was supposed to do the blessing, wanted to do the blessing. And Daniel stepped into his place and said, look, my material providence is better than your spiritual providence. It's part and parcel of the envy and the competition that's in him. He can't have Eli being the one who's going to provide in some way for these people. He's got to be the one. Now it puts him in a kind of constructive position with regard to others and he does have that in him. When he says there's going to be no more hitting for Mary, he has certain constructive impulses that are evident here, but they all seem to get co opted by envy. Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm joining this up in the end. I forget where you got at the end of your comment. 14:05 Erin: The idea of his ultimate desire for connection or his reliance on people ultimately. 14:09 Wes: Okay, yes. So he's also relying on people, which is something he hates and doesn't really want to do. But he's got to have workers. 14:17 Erin: Yeah. And he has to use other people's land because he doesn't have any. I mean, I think this is central too to the ambivalence within oil itself as a symbol. I'm interested in Daniel and Eli as oppositional in terms of this idea of what you earn and what's just given to you. Things we, we do and don't earn. And I think Daniel is obsessed with what you earn, that is with like acquisition on the basis of skill, of not having anything and then getting it. Whereas Eli is interested in the idea of a gift. You know, he's the faith healer. He's interested in faith, period, which is about grace, which is fundamentally something that you don't earn. He is a pastor and therefore a maker of people to join this faith family. You know, the faith is conceived of as a, as a family and he can make more family members. Daniel believes that he gets his worth out of earning things and doing things himself. Therefore that makes him better than other people who might just luck into things or just inherit things, you know, things that we can inherit our family or land or faith or whatever. And I think this is oil too. Like oil has this duality to it where it's about. It's certainly on the one hand about luck and you can strike oil. Some people strike it, some people don't. Some people have the gift. Right. Some people have oil underneath their land like the Sundays do, and some people don't. But we also get the idea that some places that have oil don't know how to get at it. Right. And Daniel himself introduces this idea, you know, okay, oh, you have oil here. Well, how are you going to get it? You know, it's. It's in the ground. How are you going to get it out of the ground? He repeatedly asked this question. So you can have this as a gift, but it's also about strategy about acquiring that oil, about getting it out of the ground, about management and managing of the people that own. You know, if you don't believe in land as a representative of a kind of a legacy or an investment in a place or being a part of a community, which I think land all represents, then part of your skill and your management and your acquisition of the oil is about convincing somebody to lease you their land. So I think that kind of duality is inherent in the acquisition of the oil itself. Right. You can't just, you have this deposit and you may know it's there, but you still can't get at it because you don't have the resources to do so. Insofar as we can say you either have oil or you don't. It's like Eli, right? You either have faith or you don't. You either have the gift to heal or you don't. But insofar as you can say that, you can either get at it or you can't. It's like Daniel in that you need the skill, the resources kind of stored up over year. Right. Because he uses the silver money ultimately to get into oil too. So it's like this long planned out, long thought out kind of strategy about being able to even have the resources to think about getting the oil out of the ground. 17:14 Wes: Yeah. But will God look favorably upon his offering? Anyway, we'll get to Cain and Abel later, but I thought a bit about Treasure of the Sierra Madre as well, and I think it's a good maybe compare and contrast for his particular motive. Because it sounds like you're pointing to the sort of industriousness in his character. Is that right? 17:37 Erin: Okay. 17:38 Wes: All right. So the hard work and that. So it had me thinking about Howard's speech in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And really he's trying to convince the other two. He's trying to get them worked up about going on an expedition, but he's doing that by saying all the wrong things. Saying how gold makes men crazy and people blow one fortune trying to find another. And prospecting is like gambling. It's physically dangerous. If you do it alone, it's too lonely. But if you do it with others, it creates this kind of paranoia and these violent rifts between people. And that's his elevator pitch. And it gets the others excited. What they're excited by is that it is in a way like gambling in one sense, because you can go from nothing to everything very, very quickly. And as you point out, it involves an element of luck. But on the other hand, it's not just abstract, like tossing a coin or something. It's not abstract and it doesn't involve no work. You get to do work and you get to do physical work. And to be in contact with the land and all of that stuff. There's almost a wholesome element to it. If it weren't for the fact that it's exploitation of the land and trying to scoop out the resources that are in the land. So I think in Treasure of the Sierra Madre there's something about the promise of this highly risky contact with both the physical world and the social world, right? So mining is physically dangerous and then there's the danger of paranoia. So there's social risk that you put yourself in this extremely risky situation and then if you succeed, you transcend those worlds. As with Daniel, you don't have to be around people or you're in a position where you have power over them and can control them. And the same thing with physical work. You wouldn't have to necessarily do any physical work anymore. And there's kind of an abstractness in the power that comes with being rich. So it's a physical project. It's not like the boredom of office job or even being a stockbroker. I guess being a stockbroker is exciting, but it's not the same physically risky thing. But you get to acquire riches without the tedium that necessarily the tediousness involved. So there's that again, that element of the excitement of gambling. But with Daniel I don't see much of anything of that. With him it's almost like self punishment from the very beginning. That's the kind of vibe I get from him. He's self hating and self punishing. It's grueling. He's doing it. There's no exciting prospect or fantasy that's leading him on except for domination of others and revenge against others and envy and all that stuff. And the point isn't even necessarily to get over his envy. It's just to deepen it. As I said, it's kind of to drill down into it. To drill down into his own character and to make it more and more what it is. More and more bitter, more and more empty. And that's what you get. Even his mansion in the end, right? That's just a place of squalor. You can't imagine him really enjoying the luxuries that go along with being rich. And he's at the saloon with Henry. There's no indication that he's even interested in women or any of the things that money might help him get. The only thing that seems to interest him is the grueling, laborious project of getting there. So now the question is that you have me thinking about. Yeah. How does that compare or contrast to industriousness where people are just. They work hard because, I mean, there are many different reasons. Obviously, they could do that. They might work hard just simply because they love the work. They might work hard because they're ambitious or because it alleviates anxiety for many, many different reasons. But. But in his case, I'd link it, again to envy. It's definitely industriousness, but it's tainted with that, I guess, in my view. 21:59 Erin: I know we've talked about this in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre episode as well, but you've gotten me thinking about this interesting duality inherent in any kind of treasure seeking, in which we might say that there's a strange conversion to work inherent in the mechanism of the real work, the reality of the work which was undertaken to escape work. So if that makes any sense. Right. So the fantasy is you strike it rich, you never have to work again. What happens is you have to work so hard to get the means by which you never have to work again, that what might end up happening is you're converted to the desire for work. Suddenly having the riches and not knowing what to do with yourself is a far scarier prospect than always having another mountain to climb and, you know, something to dig up or. Right. So I think that what happens over the course of this. Because they are two incredibly grue, both gold and oil are incredibly grueling and dangerous and difficult things to acquire. I think what happens is you then get people becoming addicted to the chase, to finding the deposit somewhere new, to the excitement of what that means, and also to the satisfaction of the work itself, which then renders the fruit of that labor beside the point or even ultimately destructive. Because once you are In a life of leisure, you have no way of exercising that whatever. I mean, if it's an addiction, it's a sort of positive one. I suppose you could become a workaholic or whatever, right? But that addiction may be to something like excitement and pride in being able to accomplish something. You know, I should say that during the filming of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre every night. You know, so it was constantly on his mind. I think the differences here. Okay, so I've already kind of maybe made this distinction, right? But oil is newer. Oil is about sort of. We've reached a certain point in the Industrial revolution where the acquisition of oil is occurring in tandem with the car and various other things that make its acquisition more. I mean, it was always sort of useful, right? And it was always around, but particularly pertinent. And so it's a sort of a. Later. We're talking about drilling in this film. In a continent which has already been filled up. Gold is kind of, you know, you go into the middle of nowhere or you try to find the places that people haven't been already to try and get the gold. But the initial gold rush was at a very early stage in Western expansion, before all of those deposits were extracted and there was nothing left. Oil is required by and also demands more engagement with society, I think, than gold does. Gold panning is technically something you could do by yourself, right? I mean, you get a higher return if you have a group of guys, as they do in Treasure of Sierra Madre, than you do if you just by yourself in a river. But you could technically do it by yourself. And it is something which can be dangerous and difficult if you're going off by yourself into the wilderness to do it. But it doesn't require, I think, an infrastructure the way the oil industry does, which, again, is that something that kind of is necessitating a community. So the work for Daniel is about scratching, I think, two kinds of itches. The oil work is both about doing something really difficult and physically demanding, and also getting to cheat other people, basically getting to manipulate them, like getting back at people. So the engagement with society that oil is necessitating is distasteful to him, but it's also giving him an outlet to get out his anger and aggression against people with these tactics of manipulation and, you know, selling. Selling the land out from under. Under people's feet and taking something right from under their nose. That is a big part of the appeal for him as well, that kind of engagement, something like revenge Maybe, yeah. 25:54 Wes: I think there's something about, in particular about the subterranean element here that is attractive to him. It starts out with silver and then moves on to oil. And I think we know why you can't do the milkshake trick with silver. His envy. He wants to take things away from people. He doesn't want them to have it. That's part of the envy. And there's something really neat about oil, which is drainage. You don't actually have to be right above the oil deposit in order to get at the oil deposit. So you can stick your straw right into someone else's milkshake and drain it without them even knowing it. And then they find out that they've been depleted after that. That is a perfect picture of a very sneaky kind of envy where you. It's almost something vampiric about it where you suck someone dry without them knowing it. And then when they're finally aware of it, yeah, they're desiccated, they're dry. And they don't have what's theirs. He has what's theirs. So, yeah, there's something in particular about going underground. And something that's liquid again, that can be drained out from another is almost as if it were their blood. That's really important. 27:21 Erin: That helps me understand the difference really well. Because I think ultimately in Sierra Madre, you know, the idea of management there of the gold is really about self management. I think it's. It's about, like, how do you deal with the goal? I mean, you know, there's this envy and this paranoia that comes with it. But I think ultimately what that comes down to is like controlling your own mind so that you don't get out of control and have that mind, that paranoid mind affect, you know, the actual state of things. Whereas this is a very different. This is much more inherently about other people's minds or control of other people in this envious way that you're describing, which is, I think, very different from personal greed and the desire to sort of gather to oneself everything that is out there in the world. Right. This is about reaching out and taking from other people. You know, I think it's also about stealing from people in this. I love this way that you're describing of like sucking their blood. It's very similar, I think, to the dynamic of water in Chinatown as well, where. Where we have this. You're stealing the future from people too. You know, you're. You're controlling the future. And I think oil is very much, very much functioning in the same way. Oil is about what. It's about finding it and then putting in your car and driving to the next destination where you can find more oil, you know, so there's sort of like a perpetual motion machine element to extends, I think, in kind of two directions. It's about the past because it's about vast deposits of decayed creatures millions of years old. But it's also. It's finite and it's consumable, but it's sort of abundant with possibility because it could be put to so many different uses. I think water. Water sort of works in the same way where it has that duality. It's. It's sort of a finite resource in a way, because it's consumable and it could become tainted and stuff like that. But it's also sort of an infinite ecosystem. So it seems like Daniel's domination is both personal and general over people. He's draining the oil from your particular land that you are trying to sell in order to humiliate you. And he is also taking all the oil for himself in a way that is symbolic of sort of an entire community or even a country's future. So he gets to play God in this way that is about more than like, personal vendettas. It's like a vendetta against all of. All of creation. Just as he doesn't. He's not interested in women because. Because he's not interested in. In creation that he hasn't stolen. Right. Or he's not interested in water and blood. 30:09 Wes: Right. Well, the envy, the envy, is that there are many forms of envy that would come along with that. Right? The envy of her procreative ability and the fact that she, as a woman, would have something that he wants that is always going to be outside of him, even if he's in relation to it. He needs to be more than in a relationship. He needs to suck it out, suck out the essence and keep it for himself. That's not related, that's not relational. 30:39 Erin: You're making me like him a lot less than I did going into this. Not that I liked him, but you know what I mean? Like, I thought, you know, there's something. Something to admire about him. 30:49 Wes: Well, that's a good question. I mean, is there anything that one might admire in the. In the manner that, you know, you would admire a tragic hero for all his villainous. Some of them are villainous, I guess. So Some tragic heroes you might. You might admire for their villainous traits or for their other flaws, because there's supposedly some element of greatness to them. And then the question is, is there an element of greatness here and is there something tragic about it? And I think the initial comment I made about the tragic thing here is it's a little bit oblique to that in a way. Why is that? I don't know. Do you have something to say about that? Yeah. Is this tragic? Is he great? 31:29 Erin: You know, my idea is he's missing half of himself and Eli is missing the other half. Right. Together they would be one perfect person. Maybe, I don't know. But the half of him that he has is somehow less distasteful to me than the half that Eli has, you know, because he's so controlled. I mean, that starts to slip with the whiskey drinking. Right. But he is so much in control and he has so many skills and such a. Such a work ethic. I mean, he does such a heroic thing at the beginning of the movie, dragging himself all the way into town from this mine that he was just working by himself. I can't watch that and not think every time, even though I know what's going to happen to him. Like, wow, this is a spectacular person. 32:15 Wes: Yeah. 32:15 Erin: That takes so much. What does it take? I don't know, it takes so much discipline or something. What's the right word for that? It's just skill. I just keep coming back to skill. 32:24 Wes: Well, there's industriousness and there's hard work and again the willingness to sacrifice his body and just the sheer amount of physical exertion involved. But again, I think of this partly in terms of self punishment and the desire to punish others. And then also I haven't been able to articulate it, but there's something doesn't rise to the level of tragic hero in this. Is there a greatness? Yeah, it's hard for me to want to say that there's something great about him. 32:57 Erin: Well, I think ultimately his. He's small minded in ways that I think you've articulated well. You know, all of this. If there is greatness there, it's put to such warped and twisted and small minded ends. 33:08 Wes: Yeah. One might say of someone, they had huge ambitions, but there was hubris or something like that. And his ambitions in a way are huge, but they're also not. They're very narrow. 33:21 Erin: Well, he wins in the end, but he, you know, so he doesn't have huge ambitions which are. Then, you know, usually the second half of that sentence would be but he failed. But he didn't fail. So it's, it's more about the manner that he went about acquiring and it's. Though oil, I think, has this huge symbolic weight to it. What his actions are actually about is going family by family, strategically across the area that he wants to, and getting these innocent or naive farm people who don't know about this industry, who are just. Just uninformed, to sign their land away to him. Right. And that, I think there's an ugliness in that. Like it takes industry to go. To go, you know, family by family to do that. But ultimately, yeah, it's a. It's a bit of an ugly thing. And we discover over the course of the, you know, the first third of the film what a liar he is and how manipulative he has to be to do this effectively. So it sort of like requires selling his soul in a thousand tiny little ways every day. In the end, he gets everything, I mean, everything according to a certain standard of fantasy. 34:31 Wes: Brings me back to the contrast you're making between oil and water. Because water is sort of a paradigmatic example of something that belongs in common to the community and has to be managed at that level. And it's elemental, it's necessary to life. Right. And it's one of the ancient elements, according to the ancients, one of the basic building blocks of the universe. Oil, on the other hand, is not that, unless you compared it to the element fire. Right. Aristotle puzzles over the pre Socratics and their elements because where do you get motion from? Where do you get force from? It's not a very dynamic picture of the world. Unless you say that fire does that. And if oil is of course, what does that, it lights these fires that can run these machines and. And produce ultimately all sorts of technology and really transform the world. But it's not necessary as such to life. It's really techne. It really is technology and it amplifies and transforms life in these radical ways. So when he takes away, what he does is he provides water to the community. Again, he's sort of like a Jesus stand in. In that sense. He really does these things for the community. He provides for the communal, the material aspects of the communal good, which he wants to supplant the spiritual aspects altogether. He wants them to eclipse the spiritual aspects. But in doing that, that's not what interests him. He's not interested in necessarily taking that stuff away from people and maybe immiserating them or pauperizing them. Exactly. He wants this particular stuff. He's going to prevent them from being rich. He's going to take away that possibility from them, he's going to take away any possibility of them competing with him, of being rivals. But he doesn't necessarily just want to kill them off entirely, as far as I can tell. And then again, the thing that he's interested in, this substance, you could argue this is another thing that should be part of the common good. It should be a communal possession, maybe the way it is in some Middle Eastern countries, But in this case, it's just, does your land happen to have it? Okay, you're lucky you're rich now or you don't have it, you're not lucky, you're not rich. And the whole milkshake and straw thing points to this idea that, well, does it really matter that it's under someone else's land? Is this anyone's in particular if it can be accessed from over here? It points to this weirdness of not treating it as maybe a communal possession, given all the potential that it has to not only transform an individual person's life in the sense of making them rich, but in the sense that it's going to transform the world. It's going to radically transform the world. So that's power that he's at. He's not getting at the good, but he's getting at power. 37:37 Erin: Yeah. You have me thinking about luck and what luck would mean under these circumstances. Because I wonder if there's a distinction we can make then between the gift of oil and the luck of. Or a certain kind of luck. I mean, to me, you're lucky if you can actually make use of it. Lucky would be you have land that has oil under it and a derrick falls from the sky, and you have a way of getting it out right? Instead, I think the idea of the gift is like, okay, you have this land and you may have oil, but you may not know how to what to do with it. Luck is something which is. Which is sort of quick activating. It's something which is a true fluke that comes with a reward instantly. You know, a gift is something that has to be. It's just something you're given and you just have to. You then have to do something with it. You know, it's like you're given a Lego set and then you have to put it together. Or gift is your family. You're born into a family, but you have to tend to that. You have to. You have to nurture those relationships. You can't just say, I mean, to a certain extent you can. That's the whole mother thing, right? To a certain extent, you could say I'll. I could do whatever I want and I'll still have a mother. That's true. But you can't actually, with most relationships in the family, you can't treat people however you want and then. Or like, try to kill them or shoot them in the head. Okay, he's not really family, but you can't. You can. You can't do that. And then. And then still expect that gift to be something which will give you something. I don't know if that's right, because my idea of Eli is of someone who, in theory, he's a faith healer, which is something to me and probably more to you is something suspect. Right. But if he has this gift, he has to control it properly and use it properly and give it the proper. Whatever you might call it. Cultivation seems like the wrong word, but something. He needs a control. And ultimately what we find by the end of the film is that he's. He doesn't have that ability to control the gift. Right. He squanders the gift. And that's why he's. What's the word? It seems like he's. He's tried to become, you know, a radio personality and one of the. One of these like Aimee Semple McPherson kind of figures who uses this in a mass media kind of way and then. But has no self control and then destroys himself. 40:01 Wes: Well, he lacks the discipline that Daniel has. So maybe that's the point where we admire Daniel and we definitely don't admire Eli. Although it's not apparent in the beginning, it only becomes apparent in the end, I think how lacking in discipline he is and how susceptible he is to temptation and even lacking in integrity in the end, where he's gonna renounce God in order to get some money. But is that what you were getting at? 40:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And admiring Daniel, to go back to that. I mean, I think I also. I think it's this yearning spirit to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Right. You get back onto the ship and you go back out even after you just got home, after, you know, being away for 20 years. There's something about that that I really love. That's maybe what I admire in Daniel, and that's what makes the ending so tragic, is that he's achieved a level of success that means that he can no longer go out and do the striving and do the work. But that love of work, even if what the work constitutes sometimes is pretty ugly, the physical components of it and those which require strategy, that are not about manipulation and that labor and the desire to keep laboring and keep working at something. I mean, there's a very good chance. I'm also attracted to the self punishment element of that. But there's something, I think that. Which is very admirable in that like you're never. You're never just resting on what you have. You're never just self contented and lazy. That drive, I think is what I admire in Daniel. 41:38 Wes: Yeah, I think the way I look at his industriousness and discipline. There's not a big dream there. There's not a big ambition. Because the ambition is just to want to get away from people. I mean, there's not even like an evil ambition. I'm going to take over the world and do evil things. And he's definitely not a do gooder. I'm going to do all kinds of good things. If I can do this or I'm going to. Once I have all this money, I'm going to. What does he say in Treasure of the Sierra Madre about dames? 42:12 Erin: Get the dames. Rings on the fingers of swell dame. 42:17 Wes: Swell dames. Yeah. So there's not even some sort of fantasy of pleasure seeking or love or. There's only one little narrow focus. So like when he gets the mansion, I mean, I think he talks to his brother at one point about the house. What does he say about that? Or talks to Henry about it. We get the sense that there might be some sort of ambition to have a nice house. Right. So there's the house in Fond du Lac that John Hollister built. Do you remember it? I thought as a boy that the most. It was the most beautiful house I'd ever seen and wanted it. I wanted to live in it and eat in it and clean it. And even as a boy I wanted to have children to run around in it. And then Henry says, so there's a real. Right. That's an aspiration. That's the aspiration he has as a boy. He doesn't have that aspiration anymore. And Henry says, you can have anything you'd like now, Daniel, and you should. Where are you going to build it? Then? He said, here maybe near the ocean. Would you make it look like that house? I think if I saw that house now, it'd make me sick. And then Henry goes into wanting to get, you know, get some women. And then they have that unpleasant time. Well, Henry's enjoying himself with the ladies, but Daniel is not. And then Henry is going to have a really bad time. Shortly after that, he's going to pay for his sins. But anyway. But. Yeah, but my point here is that there's no. That kind of aspiration is actually gone. One might think that that would be the typical kind of motivation behind all this industriousness and discipline. Even if there's workaholism and love of the work itself. And in a way, I don't. Again, because of the self punishment aspect and just his general character, I don't get that feeling of, oh, he loves the work. And I just love being outside and in contact with mother Nature. 44:11 Erin: Oh, I think he does. 44:13 Wes: He wants to. But I think he envies Mother Nature as well. He wants to take. He wants to exploit nature and take what's in it. Yeah. 44:23 Erin: Yes. No, I'm just. Yeah. I don't think he. I don't think he loves Mother Nature. I think he gets excited by the oil coming in. I think there is. I see the love of the work. I see it when they go on the Sunday property. 44:35 Wes: But it's to me, it's like addictive, hateful. It's like it's a fulfillment of hate. Like. 44:40 Erin: Yeah, well, you're revealing to me. You're revealing to me why I. Why I think in a way he's so noble is because there is no. 44:48 Wes: His motives are very. 44:50 Erin: His motives are pure. Exactly, exactly. In that there is no motivation. The motivation is more work. Like, there's no pleasure. That. That seems to me to be the purest thing of all. In other words, I'm not doing this so that I can be rich. I'm not doing this so that I could have a nice house. I'm not doing this so that I'm going to get a lot of pleasure from it. I'm. I'm doing it. And then when I'm done doing it, I'm gonna do it again and I'm gonna do more. Just like I said with the oil thing. That's what oil is about. Oil is about getting more oil. Oil is about finding more oil. Even the silver he gets in an oily way. He uses the silver to get to the oil. Silver and gold are ends in and of themselves, as we've talked about in the Sierra Madre episode. You know, it's about putting rings on your fingers, showing how much wealth you have in silver and gold. It's about wealth and greed itself. Oil is about working to get more oil. Oil is about going somewhere. You're always going, going, going. And that is. That is very interesting to me that there is no end. 45:49 Wes: Yeah, that's. Yeah, well, Put. I mean, I think the way I would put it is he. He's an empty person. And there's a way in which he's not. He's not just trying to fill himself up, right? He's not just trying to take what's in the earth and put it inside him in some way psychologically. He's just trying to expand his emptiness over everything else. He's trying to create emptiness in the earth by removing the oil. He's trying to be above others and away from others. So to create all this negative space that is his psyche, to push it out into the world as much as possible. 46:25 Erin: You have me thinking about the crisscross at the heart of Christianity or any religion in which there is a promised afterlife. Right. That's the reward, in a way. I mean, it always seemed to me as a kid, heaven shouldn't exist because your motives are always going to be tainted, you know? So Daniel reminds me of that, maybe that. That impulse in myself to be suspicious of heaven. So the idea is, the way you get out of that is that you're doing something for the people around you, hopefully. Now Daniel isn't doing that. He's manipulating them. But he has HW to do things with and for. And he has this promise. I mean, maybe it's just. Ultimately, it's just about being a big man and getting other people to admire him as they. As he thinks they should so that he could give out the. You know, he can irrigate the land and give out the bread. But so long as he had this relationship with H.W. he had a way. There was not emptiness. At least he's showing the kid how to do it, too. So he's doing something for someone else, helping them in some way, even if it's just educating them in this, yeah, complicated and interesting kind of knowledge. 47:32 Wes: So, yeah, maybe let's start with that relationship in part two, then. That relationship. His relationship with Eli. Yeah. That relationship in particular has represented a possibility for redemption that doesn't come to fruition. 47:47 Erin: Okay, so we'll talk about Daniel's relationship with H.W. and Eli and Henry in part two. Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education. Upcoming Episodes: “There Will Be Blood,” “Julius Caesar,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: [email protected] Subtext podcast. 0:31 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Last time, we talked a lot about the two different conceptions of health and vitality at work in the play. One associated with the mayor and more conservative, and one associated with Dr. Stockman and more progressive. We wanted to start out here in the second part of our conversation by talking about the moment where Dr. Stockman delivers the news about the pollution of the water to his family. So in the lead up to this, we get an interesting conversation after Petra comes in and talks about slaving away while they're having fun. 1:17 Erin: And poor Petra. 1:18 Wes: But then we get this talk of one of her younger brothers saying she must be sinful because work is punishment, and says he wants to be a Viking instead, but that would require becoming a pagan, which Billing endorses. And then Mrs. Stockman says, all right, time for bed. I don't want to. Don't want the kids to be corrupted by this. And Billings says, we'll all be pagans soon. And then the younger brother, Morten says, and then we can do exactly what we want. So we get these little hints about the dangers of the progressive point of view. Right? Which is that. And the rejection of the old values, which is that there are no new values. It's just nihilism. People can just do whatever they want. 2:03 Erin: Or you might become Wallace Stevens, something like that. 2:07 Wes: Take a little existentialist solution, maybe. But then, yeah, Petra complains a bit about the hypocrisy of school and having to teach kids things she doesn't believe, presumably religion. We'll find out later. She won't translate a story for the paper because it's too religious. So it's a kind of conversation you would expect among people of a progressive temperament, let's say. And then it's after that. But Stockman, who's been in his study with his letter that he finally received from Petra because she stole it from the mailman. He would have gotten it sooner if it weren't for her. He comes in with a letter, very excited, and he says, this news will get the town talking, believe me. Exclamation point. 2:53 Erin: And of course, that's the most important thing, is to make the masses talking. 2:58 Wes: Sorry, there's a lot of exclamation points for him. And he'll make a point of telling Aslaksen that. Don't take any exclamation points out of my. The thing you're publishing in the newspaper. Steve McQueen takes all the exclamation points out as far as I can tell. Maybe in fact add a few, heats up later. Yeah, right, yeah, add a few. 3:19 Erin: Yeah, that's a great funny line. 3:22 Wes: So then he says now let them come and say as always, that it's all some fanciful notion and the ideas of a madman. Right? So we know now that he's been accused of being a flake before and he wants to prove everyone wrong. And then he says, but they'll think twice. All right, Haha, they'll think twice, I'm sure. Sorry, I know this is very bad. 3:43 Erin: No, it's great, it's great. 3:45 Wes: And then he's wishing that the mayor were there and it says, it shows how we human beings go around passing judgment like the blindest of moles, which is a bit double edged. Right. He's think he's thinking of everyone, including himself there, that blindness of judgment. But in a way we really suspect that of course it's directed at the mayor and others who don't know as much as he does. Right. He comes at this from a position of real whether or not my skepticism about the report is warranted. It's not really skepticism about the report, it's more skepticism about his attitude, which is one of utter certainty. He's both at the level of the waters being polluted, but also for values. He is an absolute epistemic authority and he cannot be questioned. And so later on he'll say this thing. And he also delights in this reversal, in his discovery where fair is foul and foul is fair. This thing, the spa institute, that was the artery, the nerve center and billing chimes in and says the beating heart. Right, let's up the ante here. In reality, the entire spa is a cesspit. This thing that's supposed to be a source of health and life that we can later on will be obviously a metaphor for the existing norms, the existing values of society and a representative authority. This is a. He also calls it a poison sepulcher. There's so much delight in that that that's one of the interesting things about the play. It's not as Steve McQueen delivers it, just some very sober person who's obviously concerned about the well being of the community delivering the speech. It's someone who, Ibsen puts a lot of work into making his motives suspect or at least double, you know, multi determined. 5:43 Erin: Yeah, that's right. You know, going back a little ways in the same act, you know, Stockman says several times to his brother that he's he, that a man of Science ought to live in a little style or something like that. Like, he ranks himself with the top governor of the municipality or whatever the. Whatever the terminology might be. This idea, as we've already talked about in part one of this natural aristocracy is one, you know, which he seems to espouse. But it. It's related to this idea of expertise. He's the expert, and therefore we should. We should believe him. And he is so sure, because he's the expert. Like, there's. There's a little bit of a. There's a little bit of circular logic there. He's the doctor, so he can diagnose. And what gives him the authority to diagnose is that he's the doctor. He has this real grandiosity about himself. And then I love this idea of the blind as a mole thing that you're pointing to, because I hadn't noticed that before. And of course, it makes sense then that he would. He would take this authority upon himself as a doctor and related to this idea of being expert because he's the only one who can see it, right? We're all blind. But because he has, you know, gotten these microbes tested which are naked to our eyes, he knows he has the expertise and only he has the eyes to see what the problem is. I mean, I think you're right that he speaks generally of being like a mole. But now his eyes have been opened, and his job is to open other people's eyes and make sure that they take his expertise, his authority seriously. And then he. The first. I think this. This might be wrong, but one of the first, if not the first metaphors that he uses. You know, you talked about the. The cesspool and. And the. Or cesspit and sepulcher. But the way that he constructs that is he says this spa institute, which has been described as the town's artery, the town's nerve center and the devil knows what. And Billing cuts in and says, the beating heart of our town. I allowed myself once in a festive moment to. And he. Stockman cuts him off. Yes, that too. But do you know what it is in reality, this great, splendid, lauded spa institute that has cost so much money? Do you know what it is? The entire spa is a cesspit. And of course, he says this with great enthusiasm, but I think it's so key that the first thing he connects it to is a body. The spa is a body, and he's going to diagnose what's wrong with it. So if society is a body, if whatever it is that you're looking at is a body and you're a doctor, then of course you should be number one in town. Of course you should live like the governor. You know, you're better than the governor. You could see. You could see and diagnose what other people can't. It's so important to understanding. His grandiosity is this idea of himself as being expert in this way that no one else. He has a knowledge that no one else has access to. His delight in that discovery and that knowledge seems to be part of what's really feeding his mania in this moment. I love the note. Walking contentedly about, you know, he's like walking around the room, you know, going on and on about his great. You know, his great discovery. 8:58 Wes: Yeah. You would think. Right. Well, I've got some really bad news. Sit down. Right. Because this is going to hurt. No. Elated to deliver this news. And then. Right. And he thinks the university sample, you know, he said the samples he sent to the university for analysis, they prove there's, you know, decayed organic matter in the water infusoria, in vast quantities. It's seriously harmful to the health whether taken internally or externally. Yeah. Has the lab told him that as well? Did the lab draw that scientific conclusion about the harm? Right. Do we know that it really comes from the sludge? I think if I sent samples from my bathtub to the university, they might come back with some disturbing. 9:48 Erin: Right. As I took a drink of water 9:50 Wes: infusoria, we got a bunch of pasty bodies going into the water and bringing their own infusoria with them. Of course, there's decayed organic matter in the water. That scene in Caddyshack. Now I'm thinking of where Bill Murray finds a Baby Ruth in the pool. Everyone thinks it's these. Right. Not to be overly. Not to be gratuitously skeptical about this, but I think it fits in with the rest of the characterization of Stockman's elation and then his level of certainty about this, which we, at least as an audience, we don't get the picture that it's entirely warranted. Right. If Ibsen wanted to make sure that we were. That we knew that we should share Stockman's certainty. You know, maybe you could say this is like the third lab I sent it to. I wanted a second opinion. I did this. We could have gotten a lot more information about the samples being tested, but in particular about the scientific opinion that they are harmful whether taken internally or externally. Right. Because we could imagine that. Yeah. This is not water you would want to drink, but this is kind of water people bathe in. Yeah, pretty much. It could be something like that. So lots of little subtle hints here that I think are important. 11:07 Erin: Yeah, that's right. You know, one of the interesting elements of the Ray film from the 80s, and I think one of the ways in which he makes the doctor so straightforward is that there is actually a scene where he goes to. In this, it's the temple water which is contaminated. And so they have, like, all these pilgrims coming to the temple. And therefore, that's sort of how the. There's an interesting, like, faith element, you know, that comes in with that as well. Well, these are supposed to be healing waters. And how dare you say, you know, it's like saying that, you know, to put it in. In my terms of reference, you know, don't take the water at Lourdes. It's gonna make you sick. And it's like, well, how. How would it make you sick? It's supposed to be. It's supposed to heal. You actually did not do the reverse. Right. So you actually have a scene where the Stockman figure goes down to the temple and watches the pilgrims actually sip the water, like, throw it on their face, you know, hold it in their hands. And it's a moment of real power because you actually see people in the water, you know, like the spa. There's no sense that it even exists in this. This play. Right. I mean, of course it does, but, like, there's no real world sort of consequence, it seems. There's no scene that we get where we see people getting sick. There's no discussion, really interesting to have 12:27 Wes: a scene at the spa. 12:28 Erin: Yeah, right, right, exactly. Yeah. There's not. 12:30 Wes: The only location scene is at the printers. Yeah. 12:33 Erin: So it's so interesting that this symbology that the doctor is going to properly diagnose this town and heal this town from its problems, is actually so divorced from real bodies, the real consequences of this problem. And then by that same token, he's going to use his expertise to fix the problem, because he's going to give you, you know, he's going to write in his prescription pad. And as he says, we have to get the situation put right naturally. And Hovstad says, so that's possible. And Dr. Stockman says it has to be possible, otherwise the whole spa is unusable, ruined. But there's no need for alarm. I'm very clear about what needs doing, as you've already pointed out. And then he later says in his conversation with Aslaksen and Hovstad, when they're talking about using this as a political metaphor, he says, we don't need to go to all this trouble and get all these people to support us and all this other stuff because he says, I feel this matter should take care of itself. Now, I don't know if that means that he has such naivete that he thinks that just presenting his findings to the spa board will mean that it'll be solved internally or if he has some idea as to exactly how the infusoria can be killed, reduced. But the fact that he has this solution that he never ever expressly says. And then in that moment where he says the problem will take care of 13:57 Wes: itself except for moving the water pipes up higher. Right? 14:01 Erin: Moving the pipes. But isn't that really the idea that the. That the mayor gives to him? 14:06 Wes: No. I think so. It's in the. It's in the next. So after he says he's clear about what needs doing and then he's on about. He's going to tell. He wants Petra to tell the badger to tell Kiil about this because he thinks Kiil is gonna. Right. The badger sees him as a crack. As cracked in the head. The badger is gonna, you know, see that Stockman is not as cracked in the head as he thought. He's gonna have the report sent to. To the mayor. And then he says, he rubs his hands, right? As he imagines the. To do in the town, the controversy that this is going to create. Rubs his hands and then he says all the water pipes must be relayed and moved higher up. Right. It's like a physical version of revolution. There's no incremental or partial fix here. It's got to be redone. And in light of his competition with his brother. Right. Who gets the credit for this idea? Right. The mayor is very upset when people say that Stockman gets the credit. And like, well, I'm the one who did it. So you can see that. Likewise, Stockman is annoyed by the idea that the mayor is the only one who does things. And he did things the wrong way. He did things against his advice, and lo and behold, he did a little investigation to find out that they should have done it his way all along. And now it has to be redone according to his specifications. Very, very suspicious. But, yeah. Am I wrong about that? Did the mayor give him this idea? You're saying he might have given him this idea earlier? 15:44 Erin: I think you're right about that. Yeah. Because certainly he says, yes, all the water pipes must be relayed that's early. That's early enough that. Yes, this is his idea. And he says, I wrote opposing them when they were to start building, but back then nobody wanted to listen to me. Well, now I'll launch a broadside at them, believe me. Yes, I've written a report for the spa's board. I love the fact that he already wrote the report before getting the confirmation, too. That's key. It's been sitting here ready for a whole week. I've just been waiting for this. And now I'll go. It'll go off this instant. Look, four closely written pages. He holds it up and it's all scribbles, you know, 16:19 Wes: like. And stuff. 16:21 Erin: Right, Exactly. It's a total nonsense. 16:23 Wes: What do they call it? Someone just writes and writes and writes anyway. 16:26 Erin: Right, right. 16:28 Wes: Fia. Or something. Anyway. 16:30 Erin: But yeah, he. Well, you know, and, and, and to that point, I mean, when his brother sees the report before he meets with Stockman, he actually goes down to the engineer, or claims he does go down to the engineer to actually get an idea of the cost of this whole thing. So we have Stockman writing the report before he gets confirmation from the university. And then we have the mayor claiming that he doesn't believe the doctor. But then before he even goes to see. See him, has already gone down to the engineer to see how much this would cost. Which is an indication to me that. That the report must be. Must show something conclusive, you know, to give a little credit to the doctor. Right. That. That seems to me like something you would do only if you really thought that this wasn't bunk to go and see what. How it would actually be. How much it would actually cost to fix things. But there's. There's sort of mirror images in that way. I mean, just as you have. Just as you have Stockman, you know, referring to his expertise, referring to the town as the body, and he's the. He's the one that's going to fix everything. You also have the mayor taking on that kind. I mean, everyone is using this symbology, but the mayor says that he can't convince himself of the truth of Stockman's report. And he repeatedly uses. You know, I cannot get myself to believe this. I cannot convince myself. He repeatedly uses this odd sort of splitting language where he's splitting himself into two people. You know, there's him and then there's the little hostage inside him that refuses to believe that. That this report is true. And then subsequently after that, he. He. He refers to himself. He actually uses the Royal we for himself. And he says, I've been unable to persuade myself there is any actual imminent danger. And then he says, we consider it an unavoidable necessity that you make a public statement of the kind I have demanded. We as though, you know, he's more than one person. So he becomes the people in some strange way, he becomes the town. He takes on the entire town and even the spa himself, right? Like he wants to be known as being responsible for the spa. He wants to be the thing that people come to to right themselves. He wants to be the engine of economic stability for the town. So there were a few things too, that I won't be able to find now that indicated that he sort of identifies his person with the town. Of course, he's the mayor, so that would. That also stands to reason, but associates his person with the town and with the spa. And then the splitting seems to. It seems to suggest to me that he also is the people itself. And therefore Stockman's attempt to say that there's something wrong with the town or that there's something in the town's body that needs to be fixed or diagnosed pits them against each other in this crucial way. Like, I'm not sick. No, you are, and I'm going to heal you, you know. 19:15 Wes: And Stockman really misreads this at the end of the first act. And Petra says, what will the mayor think? Stockman says, surely he can't be anything but pleased at such a vital truth coming to light. And then they all have this big fantasy about how he's going to be the first man in the town and everyone's going to be celebrating him. They get induced by his mania, and they have this really unrealistic expectation of how people are going to react. And interestingly, at the beginning of Act 2, this question of how the mayor will respond comes up again, right? And Stockman gives a very different answer. So Mrs. Stockman asks him how he thinks the mayor will react. Stockman says he won't be pleased I made the discovery. I'm paraphrasing here, you know, he won't be pleased that it was I. I'm the one who made the discovery, not him. He's so damned afraid that anyone else might accomplish something for the good of the town. So we see that Stockman's kind of manic misreading of the mayor is corrected early on here. So now we get a series of other inducements. The first is Kiil the Badger, his wife's father, coming by. And Stockman had. Had the fantasy that Kiil would see that he wasn't cracked in the head because of his discovery. And of course that was a completely unrealistic expectation because Kiil doesn't believe in little Infusoria. I don't believe in your goddamn science and these supposed microbes. But Kiil is delighted by the fact that he's going to play monkey tricks on the mayor because he has a beef with the mayor. He was kicked. Kiil was kicked off the council, who, you know, they think they're so much clever than us oldies. And he even says, I'll give you some money. Press on with your monkey tricks. I'll give you some money. In a way you get the impression that Kiil is like, even his name sounds like he's the microbe, right? He's the creepy crawly one. Well, it's right after that that Hovstad wants to kind of expand the scope of this and will say it's not the swamp, but Mølledalen, that's critical. But it's the entire municipal life, right? Bureaucrats, authorities, stubborn bigots. And Stockman even defends them. He says, well, look, we need experts. And then Hovstad reminds him, well, they screwed up the laying of the water pipes and says putting it right will require press involvement. Early on, Stockman hadn't thought necessarily that they needed to give a lot of bad publicity and embarrass a lot of people in the way that Hovstad wants to do. And he hadn't yet had the idea that the toxicity comes from the swamp in which our entire municipal life stands rotting. That translation into the social sickness, from actual physical sickness to the social sickness for which the physical sickness becomes a metaphor, is created by Hovstad. And then you see Stockman get induced by that. And then Billing goes even farther with revolutionary talk. Stockman gets induced by that. It's Aslaksen who's sort of the undercurrent with the whole idea of doing what's prudent or temperate, staying with prudence and temperance. But the others drag him along into a more extreme position. 22:44 Erin: Right? I suppose the most generous reading of Stockman that we can give is just of a man who's so professorial and so delighted by science that he is, you know, an absent minded professor type, because what all of his behavior reveals is the fact that he has very little self knowledge, frankly, and of the way that he comes off and of the fact that he is so easily contaged by other people and also just very little understanding of people in general. You know, his wife is far savvier about knowing when to sort of kiss the mayor's behind a little. A little bit and making sure that he feels not so under attack. Whereas Stockman's just. Just totally unaware of his brother's feelings or aware of them, but only in the sense that he wants to play on them when he can and toy with his brother a bit. Had he an understanding of people, he would not, for instance, I mean, if he really thought this was something that could have just been taken care of by the Spa board behind closed doors, that none of this needed to get out, or the press didn't need to be involved, the homeowners association didn't need to be involved, then of course, the first thing he should not have done is open this report when he has members of the press in his house or any outsider in his house in a small Norwegian town that operates solely on gossip and then start parading around talking about how something needs to be done about it. If he had any understanding of people, he could have just gone to the Spa board, handled it privately. 24:10 Wes: These are the young people who are supposed to be the source of vitality, Right? 24:15 Erin: Right. 24:15 Wes: And he does, you know, he does find himself resisting Hovstad, as I've said. He defends the idea we need experts. And Hovstad said, these fine gentlemen can be dispensed with, speaking about the authorities. And Stockman says, dispensed with perhaps, but we still owe them a huge debt of gratitude, right? And you can read him as saying the same thing about values, right? The values that have been bequeathed to us. So Stockman is willing to try to be a bit. A bit moderate here. Hovstad presses the point. The myth of the infallibility of those who govern us must be shaken. Such notions must be eradicated like any other superstition. I think Stockman's going to use this word later on, right. In a speech that makes him sound a bit like Adolf Hitler in certain places with the eradication of vermin and the people become the vermin, as you pointed out, there's an element of naivete about getting elated about his new discovery. With the press present, he's not thinking about what they might want to do with it. And then, of course, Hovstad is thinking about his own importance, right? About. Well, really, it's the agent of change here is going to be the press, not necessarily Stockman in particular. So again, everyone wants in on it, right? 25:37 Erin: And ultimately what it comes down to is power, it seems, which is slightly different than money. But Money is a big part of it. I mean, Aslaksen, when he's talking to Stockman and is touting his position in the town, says, I come in contact with a lot of people and being known as a prudent and law abiding citizen, as you said yourself, Doctor, I have a certain influence in the town, a sort of modicum of power, I may say. And he brags that it would be a simple matter for me to get a petition together if it comes to the crunch. So it's really funny Aslaksen's position is the funniest. You know, I interpret Stockman's defense of expertise in that moment as being a kind of defense of himself. And in fact, he sees himself as the expert. And if he goes around saying that the regular people are. Need to rise up and depose the experts, well, that would include Stockman and it would include his brother. They must come from some wealth, some family wealth or something like that, even though Stockman is not doing so well for himself before the play starts and 26:39 Wes: has apparently been supported by the mayor. 26:41 Erin: Right, right. The brothers needed to set him up in this, in this job, but they must come from, from a pro, at least a prominent, if not a wealthy family in this town, because the brother's the mayor. He's a prominent doctor by the mayor's beneficence, it seems, but still. And so he's included in this, in this aristocracy. And so, so Hovstad seems to have this idea that he has power as a result of being associated with the press and being able to form public opinion and Aslaksen curiously has, has power masses, you know, because he understands the people and is one of them. And that gives him a power. He suggests, you know, he's, he's going to run a petition of thanks, for instance, for bringing this important public matter forward. And everything has to be done with temperance. So he's, he's like this, he gets his power from being so middle of the road that he's like right in the dead center of, of the people. And that somehow gives him, I mean, it does in practical effect give him a tremendous amount of power in this play. I mean, he's able to silence the doctor. I mean, partially because he's been made the arm of, of what the mayor wishes to do at the assembly, but still. 27:53 Wes: Right? I mean, yeah, Aslaksen will say, he wants to do a petition, but he. It should be composed with the proper temperance, so it doesn't upset the authorities. Hovstad tries to object, and Aslaksen jumps in and says, no, you know, there should can't be any disrespect towards the authorities, no opposition against the people with whom our lives are so closely bound. Not just closely bound, but in a way we stand on the shoulders of the authority of previous generations. If we're thinking about values, they are formative influences for us and we challenge them at our. In a sense, we want to challenge them, but they're so constitutive of our identity that it can feel in a way like self destruction to do so. And then when Aslaksen leaves, Hovstad slags him off. He's one of those in the swamp, right? Stockman defends him. Yep, but well meaning. And then Hovstad says again, the worship of authority must be eradicated in this town. This grossly inexcusable error with the water system system must be made apparent to every voting citizen. Stockman will go on to say, well, I think this is just going to go smoothly. I don't think it's going to really require this big conflict in the Hovstad. It's basically okay, yeah, we'll see. He wants a fight, he wants a fight. But yeah, as you pointed out with Aslaksen, we get someone who's in a kind of weird middle position where he's willing to challenge authority up to a point. Later on he'll say local, we can do it with the government, the national government, but local authority we have to be careful about because it's too dependent on local authority and we could end up with incompetent people if we just simply just have a revolution. So he's willing to be more rebellious at a more global and abstract level. But if there's going to be consequences to homeowners, that's another matter. 29:46 Erin: Right? And those consequences ultimately just come down to. Yeah, to lost income. Ultimately, it's about the town losing the economic opportunity that the spa represents and then showing up late to the party if they have to delay the SPAs running by two years while they fix the pipes. I think is the two years is the amount of time. And then in the meantime, that would give the surrounding seatowns a chance to catch up and to develop their own competing resorts. It's certainly a good point the mayor makes that that once this gets out, nobody's gonna wanna come to this town, whether it's whether the pipes are fixed or not. I mean, you know, I wouldn't specifically go to this spa town even if I had every assurance that it was no longer contaminated. With toxic sludge, I would probably choose a different resort. 30:34 Wes: So, yeah, you know, you gotta sympathize a bit, I think, with absolutely the practicalities of this. I mean, I would at least get a second opinion. 30:44 Erin: I mean, amity means friendship. And really, aren't we, aren't we trying to project a certain image here? 30:50 Wes: Isn't there a shark? Who knows? 30:53 Erin: Right, right. 30:54 Wes: You know, it could have been a propeller. It's like a tooth, you know, sticking out of the flesh. Well, what's this? I think it's a propeller. But anyway, yeah, it's. They get him worked up and then the mayor comes to him and says, yeah, you know, this is. I can't convince myself and you use strident language and it's going to cost a lot. And Stockman, who's been worked up by his buddies, by the youngsters, says he has the solid majority on his side, right? So he's got the idea that he'll have the people behind him and that's where they, you know, I guess when he's having his little fight with his brother, the mayor criticizes him for his compulsion to write on every topic. And Stockman says it's a duty for citizens to share ideas with the general public. And the mayor says the general public has no need whatsoever for new ideas. The public is best served by the good old accepted ideas it already has. Ultimately, the mayor will accuse him of, in blind obstinacy, cutting off the town's primary source of sustenance. So again, this idea that the town is made healthy economically by the existence of the spa. Stockman. The solid majority is on my side, the liberal minded press, blah, blah, blah. In act three, we get. I'm being a little synoptic here because we're running out of time, but in Act 3 we get billing involved. And now this word revolution is coming up. Billing says we'll go on striking blow after blow until the whole feudal elite come tumbling down. When I sat in here reading this, it was as though I glimpsed the revolution coming from afar. Then Stockman's fantasizing about writing more articles and, and in this very grandiose vein, tells Aslaksen he wants his manuscript treated like it's gold. No misprints. Right. All that quickly collapses. Of course, as we know, it doesn't take much. The mayor just has to come in and chat briefly with Aslaksen and Hovstad and Billing. They turn tail quickly and essentially betray Stockman. 33:04 Erin: Well, yeah, he says when he and his brother are having an argument, I have the Press in front of me and the, the solid majority behind me or whatever. Yeah. So he's, he's very quickly left pretty naked. I love this idea of that between the new and the old ideas. Everything is so abstract. I love the point in Act 4 when he finally gives the speech and he's going on about all these crusty old ideas. And finally someone in the crowd basically says, like, give me an example, you know, what, what are you even been talking about? Because so it's so funny that they've been talking in these grandiose terms or these rather just these abstract terms this whole time. And then, then finally he's enjoined upon to give an example. And basically the, the thing that he says is that regular people are idiots. That's his, that's his new idea. Or, or the, the old idea is that they're great and really, in fact it's a lie because regular people are dumb. That Stock Stockman's whole bag. 34:03 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, so he's gagged at the meeting. He's not allowed to talk about the water supply. Right. The general will is against him. And it's the editor's obligation, Hovstad will say, to, I think to promote the welfare of like minded readers. He should be more concerned with his family and needy children. And so Stockman says, well, yeah, I don't need to talk about the quote unquote trifling matter of our water supply being poisoned, our spiritual wells are poisoned, and our entire civic community rests on a plague infested ground of lies. We get a lot of great speeches here. It'll start out with his eyes were open when he saw the idiocy of the authorities. They should be eradicated like any other vermin, which the people laugh at. That, that talks a bit about these old men with the world of dying ideas and that these dying ideas are the actual thing that are poisoning our spiritual wells. Hovstad says the majority always have the right on their side. That's when Stockman will say the majority, they never do because it's the intelligent who are the minority. And the stupid should not be ruling over the intelligent. Now we're getting kind of republican position. Right. They're right. Thinking of ultimately of Plato's Republic, where it's the philosopher kings who should rule. Or at the very least we should have representative government and the masses should not be directly ruling over us. I agree with that. 35:37 Erin: None of us want mob rule. That's right. 35:39 Wes: Right. But he'll say the right is with myself and a few other solitary individuals, the minority is always in the right. Sounding more and more Nietzsche, here I am thinking of the few, those individuals among us who have embraced all the new, vigorous truths. They stand at outposts, truths that are newly born into the world of conscious or too newly born into the world of consciousness to have gained majority support. In any case, I just wanted to get a few of these ideas. From the end of this, he gets more and more extreme, and then we'll start insulting the. The common people as well. So he moves from disdain for the authorities to disdain for their old values, and then finally to disdain for the common people. But as you point out, it's in response to a question about an example. Do you know where that. About give us an example of this. 36:35 Erin: Oh, it's actually Hovstad who asks for an example. Stockman saying, don't talk of certain truths. The truths that the masses, the public, approve, are truths that the fighters at the outpost held to be certain in our grandfather's day. You already remember. Read that. And then Hovstad says, instead of standing there talking up in the air like that, it would be amusing to hear what these marvelous old truths are that we all live on. And thank you, Hovstad. Finally, he proves himself to be an interesting newspaperman. And Stockman says, it's the doctrine you've inherited from your forefathers that you preach mindlessly far and wide. The doctrine that the common folk, the hordes, the masses are the nation's core, that it is the very people itself, that the common man, the ignorant and uncultivated men, member of society, has as much right to condemn or approve to govern and control as the few spiritually noble individuals. 37:21 Wes: Yeah. 37:21 Erin: So is that regular people are just stupid, you know, I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you. You could take. Maybe that's an outdated reference, but I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you could take. Like, am I a poodle human or a mongrel human? 37:36 Wes: Yeah, I love the contrast between poodle humans and mongrel humans, especially because poodle 37:41 Erin: just sounds so much worse. I mean, it's just a ridiculous word. And so to have it pop up in this, in this translation. I mean, maybe it sounds more dignified in Norwegian, but, yeah, if it's a 37:52 Wes: literal dog, I'd rather have a mutt. 37:53 Erin: Well, tell me about it. Like, first of all, they have, like, if we're actually comparing this to dogs, basically, like, any breed has so many physical problems that they are like, you know, genetic inbreeding. There's the Habsburg issue at the far extreme end, which he as a doctor should appreciate. 38:13 Wes: Right. 38:14 Erin: But the, you know, the end of Act 3 and going into Act 4, I just noticed, I just accidentally opened to this page. He says that he wants to see if lily livered cowardice has the power to muzzle the patriot who wants to cleanse society. And so yeah, so we have this idea of cleansing being so, so suggestive there. And yeah, I put in the margin, I just put Nazi. So them. Anyway, yeah. 38:40 Wes: And then yeah, he'll, he'll criticize like the sort of socialist pretensions of the newspaper, the. What is it called? 38:48 Erin: The People's Messenger. 38:49 Wes: The People's messenger, yeah. So he turns on the. Yeah, the socialist pretensions of these guys. And because Hovstad says, you know, he's proud to have his roots among the common folk that, you know, that are being insulted. And that's when Stockman turns to the idea. Well, it's not just, I'm not just talking about, you know, literally about lower class people. Right. The mayor is a commoner himself. So here's what he says. He thinks the thoughts of his superiors and believes what his superiors believe, people who do that are spiritual commoners. And then he criticizes the paper for this false doctrine that the solid majority are liberal minded and moral, whereas vice and spiritual depravity ooze out of high culture. So there's sort of an anti elitist cast to the paper that includes an anti elitism when it comes to high culture. And we can kind of see that right. In the religious story that Petra doesn't really want to translate. But they're like, well, we have to give the masses their opiate a little bit so that we can. Otherwise we can kind of settle them down so that we can feed them these truths about politics. 40:01 Erin: Yeah, that's such a great tautology ultimately. Right. Like even, even the People's messenger is in a way suggestive of this because it's such an anodyne name. It's suggestive on the one hand of a socialist paper, but on the other hand it's sort of kowtowing to, you know, it's, it's a, it's in service of what the people want to hear. We have to give the masses their opiate. We have to give them their silly little stories in order to placate them. And on the other hand, they are the only true authority. We have to have them rise up. You know, there's always this there's always this fascinating blend between talking down to your core demographic and believing that they're all secretly idiots. And also like wanting to, wanting to elevate them and put them in a position of power and give them all of this authority. It's like, which is it? Are you the, the messenger to the people or are you delivering the people the message they want to hear? 40:51 Wes: No. You know, and he also says it's not high culture that corrupts people and makes them right. Like an effete limousine liberal, to bring back a very dated phrase that was once used in our politics. But yeah, but it's the lower living condition you can romanticize. Well, people live in poverty and crappy conditions and they're the salt of the earth. But he says no, it's ignorance, poverty, ugly living conditions that do the devil's work. Like if an untidy house is bad for the soul and people lose the capacity to think or act morally. And here's another very Nietzsche phrase, lack of oxygen debilitates the conscience. Right? You got to air the house out. So when he's called the enemy of the people, yeah, he's made himself the enemy of the people, right. 41:42 Erin: In the end, he makes himself the Antichrist. 41:46 Wes: There's an equivocation there. There's enemy of the people in the sense of someone opposed to their well being, and then there's enemy of the people in the sense of someone who has their well being in mind but is willing to slag them off, is willing not to flatter their sense of worth, insult them, maybe tell a little bit of the truth about them. And this is an annoying. It's hard not to. Maybe this is a bad thing to admit, but to enjoy a lot of this, because a lot of political life involves this sort of pandering, right? You pander to the masses and oh, you're the salt of the earth and you're the best and society ought to be run by you and no society ought to be run by the elites, the experts, the people who know better. And yeah, they suck too, in their own way. But the elitist in me sympathizes with these sorts of tirades. But of course they. He goes too far. So, yeah. So what do we make of him at the end of this? Well, I guess there's a new note at the very end when he turns to the idea of staying and fighting it out and being an educator. Right. That again, is the more positive spin on this, right? 42:58 Erin: No, but I take that final burst of loquaciousness from him at the end of the play to be evidence of his insanity. He's finally just lost it. Yeah, okay. 43:09 Wes: To me, it's ambiguous. Right. And the rest of them seem kind of pleased with him. You know, Petra grabs his hands. Mrs. Stockman is smiling and shaking her head. Oh, here he goes again. 43:22 Erin: Well, they've all been, you know, these 43:24 Wes: poor people are one of his harebrained schemes. And it's like everything's going to be. It's a comedic ending and everything's. Is everything going to be fine? Have they been through this before? His hair brain scheme goes wrong. Maybe moving up north was one of those schemes, but he always lands on his feet. You don't know whether if this were a more serious ending than the turn towards the possibility of educating people, including street urchins. You could take that seriously and say, okay, well, he's climbed down off his elitist pedestal. He's calmed down, and now he has a more realistic idea of what he can do that's constructive in this context. But yeah, as you point out, we kind of don't know because it seems like he just could just be crazy and that this is an entirely unrealistic plan that he has. 44:15 Erin: It seems like one more manic outburst, you know, oh, now I'm going to throw all this away. And now I'm going to. Now I'm going to homeschool, which is always a bad sign. No, I'm joking. I could say that I was homeschooling schooled. 44:33 Wes: Someone is homeschooled. 44:34 Erin: You know, everyone is bad. Now I just have to start my own school. And I'm going to say, you know, this is like one step away from being like, I, you know what? I'm going to. I'm going to form my own country where only smart people will be allowed 44:45 Wes: to come in, you know, start a cult. 44:47 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 44:48 Wes: Starting with the street urchins and. 44:50 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Of course, you know, everything that starts that way ends with Stockman drinking hemlock. But. 44:59 Wes: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid. 45:02 Erin: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid. That's right. 45:05 Wes: Which he is good at making people drink the proverbial Kool aid and getting them excited. 45:10 Erin: Is he. 45:12 Wes: The reaction to Mrs. Stockman is odd, right? Smiling and shaking her head. Oh, Tomas, no, He's just ruined their lives and now they're going to do this wildly risky thing. It's not, it's not like the end of a sitcom episode. Oh, there you go again. You know that that's not really what the moment calls for. 45:33 Erin: Could you imagine this sitcom where every single setup was like a, like a five act, you know, it's like a three hour episode where the end is like just another hare brain scheme in the life of Dr. Thomas. 45:45 Wes: Did I do that? 45:48 Erin: The next episode he starts his school and like there's an outbreak of lice and he. I don't know. 45:53 Wes: Anyway, he's like chastising the kids. You're the vermin. 46:03 Erin: No, no, but I think like, you know, Mrs. Stockman flip flops too, in the, in the play, but only because I think she's seen. Only because she sees him go through so much betrayal at the end that she's finally convinced to stand by him. Right. So, yeah, so in the end, maybe, maybe she's the one who's also gone nuts and just is like, oh, here he goes again. Because the only way she can, she can survive in this life is to just treat everything he does like some cute little flight of fancy. 46:32 Wes: Yep. And I just, you know, I think, you know, as we end, as we close here, it's just. Yet my impression is that we are, as an audience, we're left in a state of doubt where. Doubt about Stockman's credibility when it comes to the report, doubt about whether he's about to launch a more constructive enterprise or whether he's just crazy. Ibsen is not giving us an easy identification with a heroic protagonist here. It's something much more subtle and unresolved in a way. 47:09 Erin: That's right. And though I don't think this is such a. This is as great an example of this kind of phenomenon in Ibsen as, say, A Doll's House. One of the things I really love about Ibsen is that the plays always end at a moment which is not an ending so much as a threshold. So we can imagine. You know, Doll's House is like. People have written about the fact that that whole play could just be the prequel to whatever the real story of Nora's life is going to be. Right. She stands. I mean, at the end she closes, closes the door, but in so doing, she stands on the precipice of an entirely new life. And a great drama could be made out of whatever happens to her when she leaves that house. You know, maybe she goes right back in and the whole drama is moot. 47:49 Wes: But. 47:49 Erin: Right, but, but one can imagine any number of things which might happen to her after that. And I think this is not so extreme an example, but it's something of the same, Same idea here. I think this is true. The majority, if not all, of Ibsen's plays. You know what? But we could imagine a play starting right at the end of this one. Okay, this guy is hated by everybody in the community and he's cast out. What does he do? You know, it seems like the moment that Ibsen selects for the drama of his plays is always so well selected but also so resonant that one could imagine he could have chosen a different dramatic moment later on and it had been just as. Just as successful anyway. He's just these. He's such a genius. Just the mayor complaining about indigestion in the first moments of us seeing him. And it's like, Right, it's all about acid and clogged pipes. Here we go. You know, everything is so perfect anyway. 48:45 Wes: Yeah, okay. I think that's a good place to end it. Of course, there's always the next adventure that comes after this and ending, which is a movie. 48:58 Erin: And tbd. Thank you, tbd.

In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education. Upcoming Episodes: “There Will Be Blood,” “Julius Caesar,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: In Ibsen's An Enemy of the people, two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockman's is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brothers is conservative, focused on the use of authority and aesthetic self restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism and expressions of contempt, respectively, for both past and future. Today we discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the role of education. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, what do you think of that Stockman report? Do you think it's credible? 1:35 Erin: I believe it if I see it. And if these infusoria are. Yeah, I know, exactly. And they seem pretty microscopic. I just think it's all bunk. 1:45 Wes: I guess they were on the cusp at this time of believing in the little tiny creatures that we call bacteria as causes of disease. Or maybe, obviously a man of science like Dr. Stockman would believe in them, but not his father in law. He thinks it's the funniest thing in the world that anyone would believe in these things. 2:05 Erin: Well, the animals he deals with are much larger and you know. 2:09 Wes: At the tannery. 2:10 Erin: At the tannery, yeah. 2:11 Wes: Yeah. So I thought it was interesting that there are two important claims that I don't think are ever really justified very much or explored. One of them is by the mayor, his brother. That's the idea that it's going to cost $200,000 to repair the water system for the spa. And it sounded a little suspicious when he pulled that number out. I don't see him as trustworthy. And then at the end of the play in the community meeting, he says it's $100,000. So the number changes, which I think is meant to be a signal that we're not meant to actually trust that 2:47 Erin: I hadn't Realized it changed. 2:49 Wes: Yeah. Unless I'm. Unless I'm misremembering. 2:51 Erin: Well, what's even more. More suspicious is that he's talking about American dollars when they live in Norway. No. 2:57 Wes: Oh, did I say dollars and not kroner? 2:59 Erin: Oh, okay. No, you're good. 3:01 Wes: Well, it's an exact one to one. For some reason. It might be actually. I don't know. Sounds. Yeah. 3:10 Erin: How much is it? 3:12 Wes: Be funny if it were just a hundred dollars, but. Right, exactly that time. A hot dog costs 5 cents, but anyway. Actually, 5 cents would be a lot. 3:25 Erin: I know. 3:25 Wes: Probably even less in the late 19th century, but. Yeah. I'm not sure about Stockman's credibility. He does get a report back from a laboratory, an independent laboratory, confirming that there's organic. Decayed organic matter. So the water is polluted. But what does that mean? How polluted is it? How dangerous is it? We don't get a lot of specifics, and also we find out that Stockman has a lot of extraneous motives. There's an element of kind of vindictiveness and almost manic elation when he first opens that letter and reports it to others. It's funny because I tried to watch the Steve McQueen version of this. Have you ever seen that? The film version? 4:17 Erin: No. I was going to watch it and I thought I just couldn't. 4:22 Wes: It's well rated, but it's. And I didn't get through that much, but I thought it was terrible, specifically terrible for McQueen's acting and the way his choices regarding Stockman, where he tries to play Stockman in this very reserved way. It's almost like he's trying to enhance the credibility of Stockman, which is hard to do given the original play, because Stockman is often kind of in hysterics and. Or a bit manic or a bit grandiose. In one way or another, I'm gonna be the savior of the community or screw the community. So in one direction or another, there's a real question around him. He's not a sober personage, and McQueen tries to make him into this sober, melancholic, serious person. So not to dwell a lot on whether the water is really polluted or as polluted as Stockman says it is, because ultimately that doesn't matter. But I think we're meant to be a bit suspicious of Stockman or. I don't know, is there a real hero in this play? Is there a real protagonist? Because this story could have been told as a. And maybe this is what McQueen ultimately ends up doing with it. You could say this is a story about government corruption and here's someone standing up to it, and here's the very obvious hero of the story. That's not what Ibsen does here. He makes it a lot more complicated. 5:50 Erin: That's right. I would have been interested to see, but I haven't. I'll probably watch it later. But I would have been interested to see the BBC adaptation set in Scotland, I think it is. I wonder what liberties they take with that. 6:01 Wes: I watched a bit of that. I mean, I just watched like a minute or two, and it looks very good. I didn't end up watching it because it was deviate so much. 6:10 Erin: Yeah, that's what I. I thought it might confuse me, actually. 6:14 Wes: Yeah. Then I realized, actually, after looking at it a little bit again yesterday, it actually is probably quite true to the substance I see, and maybe truer than McQueen's film, which is based on an adaptation by Arthur Miller. 6:27 Erin: I think that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with the play, because you're absolutely right this time around. Reading it for the first time in a few years, I really thought Dr. Stockman is. I think, you know, you and I both now we receive media that we know. We're going to do a podcast on, sort of like through the other person's eyes. And I remember thinking that you would think that Stockman was manic and also that maybe the report was just bunk and he was making it up. So the McQueen adaptation is based on the Miller retooling of Enemy and. Which was supposed to be a parable about huac. And I think I had also mentioned that I had watched an adaptation by Ray set in an Indian town, in which the Stockman character. I forget what his name is in the film, but the guy who's supposed to be the Doctor is a hero fighting against the corruption of the town. And then there was a Jeremy Strong stage version, which was adapted by Amy Herzog, which I felt like I was the only person who had not seen that adaptation in New York. I know a bunch of people who saw it who all basically said that the speech of Stockman was retooled for that certain character. A lot. A lot of times you get characters taken out, I guess, or maybe something like a collapsing of Hofstad and Billing. And basically what all of these adaptations come down to, from what I understand when they're being used toward a certain end, is to make Stockman a straightforward hero and to use the speech as, you know, to sort of insert in the filling of the Stockman speech. Whatever political opinions they want, Stockman they think are sort of adapted to the time. And so from what I heard, the Herzog adaptation was very self consciously trying to invoke the present political moment and make a bunch of statements about. I don't know what particular political stance it was, but basically some critique of the Trump administration. You know, it strikes me that this play is so. It's treated so similarly to the way that Lear was treated in Victorian England, where they would do, you know, they would change up the ending so it wasn't so bleak. And Lear was just like this workshop for the playwright of the day to just use to kind of give it his own spin, adapt the ending in the way that whoever was retooling it saw fit. And it seems that that, like something about Lear and something about Enemy of the People inspire this desire to want to make things nicer or easier to swallow in some way. And I think Stockman is just such, ultimately such a difficult character to root for that people have this desire to go in and turn him into something that on the page he's really not. I mean, you could see him as being the villain of the play if you wanted to. I mean, not quite. I mean, everybody's terrible. There's no, there's no good character in the. But that's one of the problems is he's not the hero, it seems to me. 9:36 Wes: Yeah, I think it's a matter of people might want this to be the kind of play that it's not right with this straightforward hero resisting the system narrative. But, you know, in light of the fact that it's not that I was curious about, well, what, you know, what is Ibsen up to here? And I think, you know, we know enough about Ibsen to say that in some ways he's identified with the character of Dr. Dr. Stockman and even in his more intemperate moments, kind of shares some of these elitist condemnations that Stockman is going to make at the end of, well, a certain point in the play where he becomes disillusioned and becomes the enemy of the people. So here's what he said in a letter to the critic George Brandes. Well, here's one relevant quotation. What are we to say of the attitude taken up by the so called liberal press? I am more and more confirmed in my belief that there is something demoralizing in engaging in politics and joining parties. I, at any rate, shall never, never be able to join a party that has the majority on its side, Bjornson says the majority is always right. I, on the contrary, of necessity, say the minority is always right. I hold that the man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future. So very obviously identified in that quotation with the views of the Stockman character. He says in another letter that he's unsure whether it's a comedy or a drama. Here's another thing he said to Brandes. I'm still under the impression of the confusion and disturbance created by ghosts. So I had to write this new play, An Enemy of the People. It is a reaction against the mass hysteria, against the tyranny of the majority, against the lie which is enthroned in society. So I think there's a sense, and I think he basically admitted in a way that he is Stockman in a sense. So I thought, okay, so what is he up to here? Is he just so cantankerous that he doesn't know that Stockman comes across as a hysteric? Or is he just enjoying leaning into that idea and ribbing people? I think it's the latter. That he's approaching his own proclivities with some sense of irony and enjoying the fact, right. He gets to emit all this bile through Stockman. And it is partly against society and the sorts of people that he wants to criticize. And I think this sort of attitude actually pervades those plays of his that I've read. A certain amount of bitterness towards society. 12:18 Erin: That's certainly right. I think, too, he really flirted with social Darwinism for quite seriously for a while there. I think he later. Later changed his mind. But certainly there's an element of self parody. And he takes it as far as he can. What you've noted about the play being comic is key. That's really the only way to understand this play, I think. I mean, all of Act 2 is literally a farce. The mayor is hiding in a room. You know, it could be a bedroom comedy in a way. You know, with people running in and out and people hiding behind doors. It's so ridiculous. It's so over the top. And everyone, including Stockman, is over the top. And I think we're meant to laugh at some of the things that he says in the play. Certainly in the first scene. 13:00 Wes: This is what I was hoping for from McQueen, I thought. Cause I couldn't find any other real versions available on video. And I wanted to see. Okay, is this played in the way that I think it should be played? Is this some of the farcical quality of it and the over topness of Stockman. Yeah, and McQueen doesn't do that. I think in the other thing that I found is, and this is from the critical heritage, is that early adaptations in London are the earliest adaptation in the earliest production in English in translation in English. This is in London, 1893. They had this very oddly tall person play, Stockman, and they really amped up the comedic element. And this is what you, you know, the critics at the time. I think there's some disagreement about whether that should have been the case. Some critics really liked that a lot. Others found it questionable. I think that's a very good, that's actually a very good choice. As you point out. You were pointing out that there's a way in which it becomes farcical. 14:02 Erin: Well, it's a good visual symbol so that we immediately see that this man is self inflated, first of all. And second of all, a bit ridiculous and out of place. And I think that is important to signal, I mean, it can't be overstated how maybe a good word would be bilious, how biliously that Ghosts was received. I mean, how upset people got over that production. And you know, we mentioned a bit of this, I think in the Doll's House episode. 14:29 Wes: Well, remind me of that a little bit. Yeah. Cause I'm not. 14:32 Erin: People were horrified. I mean, it was a moral outrage. And this was the reason, I think, why people create that club or subscription service or whatever it was that allowed people to see Ibsen plays because he was considered so outrageous because of Ghosts. And Ghosts is, you know, it's such a funny play for people to have gotten so, so upset about. Like, I, I, I dislike ghosts the most of any of the Ibsen. I think I've read all of his plays and I, I, Ghosts is my least favorite because nothing happens. It's just people talking about something that happened a long time ago. And what happened a long time ago was this Mr. Alving had syphilis. And that's, that's the terrible, you know, this terrible thing. 15:13 Wes: I mean, is there not, is there any play in which someone doesn't have syphilis? 15:16 Erin: I, if there is, I don't want. Yeah, no, it's not really a play if there's no syphilis. But this was the play written immediately after Ghosts. And gosh, I'm, you know, I'm working off of long, long memory here, but I know that, I know that Ibsen said something to the effect of this one at least won't cause any controversy. I know this one's going to be okay. Like, he wrote it in response to the reaction for Ghosts in order to try and get himself back on top. So he just wanted to write a go ahead hit that would offend and bother nobody. And that's pretty incredible when you look at the content of Stockman's speech, to think that Ibsen was so sure that this wouldn't offend anybody. That can only be possible if you understand the comedic element of it. 16:01 Wes: Right. 16:01 Erin: I mean, if he's really espousing these views through Stockman in a way that people are perceiving as very serious, then I can't imagine that it wouldn't be controversial. But as it was, it was a huge hit and he was totally right. Everybody loved it and it was a big, you know, it sold big and everything. So I highly doubt that. That the. These ideas of social Darwinism were so acceptable back then. I think it had to have been that Stockman's flaws were so evident that it was not controversial. 16:32 Wes: I see, yeah. So people weren't necessarily taking all that criticism of the masses as being, what. What does he call them? 16:40 Erin: Mongrels. 16:41 Wes: Mongrels, yeah, yeah. 16:43 Erin: Animals. 16:44 Wes: They weren't taking that personally. They weren't taking that as Ibsen's considered view. 16:50 Erin: Yeah, right, right. 16:51 Wes: It seems plausible because to the extent that you identify that with. With then that sort of. I think it. To anyone, that kind of elitism is cloying, even if you can sympathize with it to some extent. Maybe at least in one's, you know, more cantankerous moments. You can sympathize with all these things that he's saying, of course, but he does sound. Start to sound a little bit like, you know, Nietzsche. 17:15 Erin: Right. 17:15 Wes: Which may be curious about whether he had read any Nietzsche and he claimed that he hadn't because, you know, he had someone write to him saying, you know, you ought to check this guy out. I think Nietzsche did read Ibsen and had a very positive opinion of Ibsen. I might have said that in our. One of our previous recordings, but, yeah. So these ideas, of course, are floating around, but some of these speeches that Stockman gives. Yeah, they could be straight out of Nietzsche. 17:40 Erin: It's a little difficult to detect in Act 1 when you're still sort of learning the characters. Right. But if you go back and you look at Stockman's very first words in the play, all of his flaws are very much in evidence. And I think one of the pieces of evidence to your point about his mania or about the fact that the report might not be legitimate. Or it might be him. What, catastrophizing or drawing a conclusion which maybe can't be drawn. I'm unsure about how to. How to characterize what might be wrong with the report. But we do know from. Granted, from unreliable sources like the mayor. That Stockman has a reputation. For always having a bee in his bonnet about something. And also, we see in his own words, you know, when he first comes on stage. He's been out for a walk during the. Shortly after dinner. And so various people have come into the house before we see Stockman. But when he comes back in, he's waxing poetic to the mayor about. I feel so indescribably content. With all this budding, bursting life around me. Which I take to be pretty. Pretty suggestive. Because, of course, he's talking about how great this place is, how happy he is. He's pointing out all these things, you know, which is really lovely. Pointing out all these nice things that he's been able to afford. Because he's been up in the north, really struggling. We also find out that he's been struggling. Partly because he's felt so bereft of the company of real human beings. But because he's such an elitist. He basically calls the townspeople where he was no better than animals. But, you know, he's. He's happy to be successful. He's so excited. He calls this a thriving metropolis, you know. But one laughs at this idea of. Of all the life bursting around him. Because, of course, during this entire scene. He keeps asking if the postman has come. And we. We learn very soon that this whole time that he's been talking about how wonderful this place is. He has strongly suspected and needed the report only to confirm his suspicion that the waters at the spa are contaminated. And that, in fact, the idea of this place as being sort of teeming with life. Is, if we're to take his report seriously. A good kind of metaphor for the. Whatever the spike of microorganisms is. That has caused some problems in the water source. So how could he be so excited about living here. And so excited about the prospect of what's going on around him. When he knows that this report is coming down the pike? It's as though he's wishing for this report. He's wishing for something to happen. He's hinting to his brother at first about what. What he's waiting on. And says there may be a great many things that are extraordinary about the circumstances. Which he's alluding to whatever is going to be in the report, or then again, absolutely nothing. It may be that it's just a figment of my imagination. So he has all this excitement about being there, but in a certain light, it could be seen as excitement about stirring up trouble, about finding something wrong, about getting to crusade for something, as though he's wishing for. For. For there to be something wrong with the water. 20:40 Wes: Yeah. When he delivers the news to his family, he's quite elated in an inappropriate way. He doesn't think about the possibility that this might be bad news for people to find out that this thing that the town, in a way relies on or is coming to rely on for its prosperity could be, you know, built on a cesspool. I think the phrase he uses, you know, he does. And then he casually says, oh, it can all be fixed very easily, which is not clear that it can be fixed very easily. So that's. He's not thinking often. He's not thinking about a. How other people might feel about this. He's not thinking about the fact that his brother might be right. Someone points out to him that the mayor, his brother, might be jealous of him. Making this discovery brings up the question of what the mayor will think of this. And I think Stockman says, oh, he'll be happy to learn about this. So there's a lot of naivete that's highlighted on the part of Stockman. 21:40 Erin: Well, you might almost think that if Stockman is happy about this discovery, it's because he knows that when they're building it, it's done shoddily. Or that something like this might happen. Right. Because they don't actually take his plans for the building of the pipes. So it does seem. I mean, there's a reading of the play in which all of this does come down to a rivalry between the brothers. 22:02 Wes: Right. 22:02 Erin: You know, where the mayor seems more obviously jealous of the brother. But. But really, if we look at the subtext, everybody drink at home, then the doctor is just as jealous of the mayor or just as undermining as attempting to be undermining of the mayor's authority or to prove that he did something wrong, that he's not as smart as the doctor is, et cetera. But if we are to take seriously the idea that Stockman is thrilled at this discovery, it occurred to me that his desire for there to be something wrong with the spa, regardless of whether or not it's. It's about competing with a brother or just about his desire to crusade for something or just I don't know. Whatever it may be, it occurs to me that it's. It's quite similar to the spa itself, the sort of functioning of the spa itself. Someone talks about the fact. I think it's. I think it's the mayor in that early scene, talks about the fact that he hopes that a lot of invalids will come. And do you remember this? He makes some really funny comment, which it's clear that the mayor himself doesn't understand is funny. 23:11 Wes: Yeah. The mayor says early on, the mayor is enthusiastic about the spa as an economic foundation for the town. And there's a good flow of money between people. There's life and activity. Right. This is in direct parallel to what Stockman will say about vitality. There's two competing conceptions of vitality here, which I want to get into in a second. And then Hofstad says, oh, and the unemployment's falling. So Hofstad is thinking now not about business and the taxpayer, but about the poor people. And then the mayor turns that into the burden of the poor. Rates on the property classes has been reduced most pleasingly. So he twists it into the economic benefit to the middle class. And that's when he says the thing about invalids. Yeah, if you want to read them. 24:02 Erin: But yeah, he says, a substantial volume of visitors, a good number of invalids, to spread the institute's reputation. You know, I love this idea that. And this probably speaks to your idea of vitality, this idea that, are we building things on health or are we building things on sickness? It's reminiscent to. Of what Billing says in regards to his desire to run for a position at the magistrate's office. When Hofstad says, you know, I can assure you you won't get it, billing responds, you think I don't know that already? But that's exactly what's so dear to me, not to get it. A rebuttal like that fires your fighting spirit. It gives you a kind of supply of fresh bile. And that can certainly be needed in a dull backwater like this, where hardly anything really rousing ever happens. I thought that was so fascinating and so maybe insightful, too, about Stockman's frame of mind, if he was wishing for there to be something wrong with the spa. So in the same way that the spa seems to be. I mean, economically, it feeds off of sick people coming to partake of it, hopefully being cured. But it needs an influx of sickness. Right, in order to produce some sort of positive result. It seems Billing operates in the same way regarding getting riled up resistance, negativity, riles him up and gives him something to react against. And perhaps that's Stockman's idea as well, which is, oh, now I have a cause. Something's wrong with the spa. Hooray. Now I have something to get angry about, and that's going to give me this influx of energy or something so that I can live to rally another day. 25:41 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is key to Stockman's early conception of what vitality is, as opposed to the mayor's. So for the mayor, it seems to be. And this gets us back to the very beginning of the play where there's a lot of great characterization of the mayor because he's come in and he's greeted warmly. He rejects food because it would hurt his digestion. He likes a plain and economical diet. We get the impression that when, you know, Mrs. Stockman says just for once. Right. There's an indication that he rarely or never accepts those invitations to eat with them. And then she worries that he'll think that they're spendthrifts. It's another thing that comes up again and again, I think, in Ibsen. And then the mayor says, not you. So little backhanded swipes against his brother. And then we find out that, as you pointed out, Stockman is out getting his 10,000 steps, but the mayor thinks that's unhealthy. That's really interesting. So he has this conception of health, which is conservative, you could say politically defensive. It's about what you have to preserve, or maybe in the case of the spa, it's about being sick and then bringing yourself back to baseline or preventing sickness. So it's in that negative territory. Whereas for Stockman, it's all about vitality. And he's going to associate that ultimately with youthfulness and progressivism and change. So when Stockman arrives and then he offers the mayor a toddy, and the mayor goes, toddy too, right. So comment about the fact that they're libertines, that they're drinking. I don't partake in toddy parties. And then he criticizes the amount of food people are eating. And Stockman says it's a joy to see young people eating. And he's thinking of their appetite and the sustenance that they get, which will increase their strength because they're the ones, the quote, ones who will dig about in the fermenting stuff of the future. So all of this warm social environment that Stockman is trying to create for the youth, who, by the way, are. There's Petra. But it's mainly Hofstad and Billing. The youngsters who will betray him and turn out not to be have any real vitality. Right. Or there's a progressivism there, but they're willing to and even a revolutionary fervor. And I think they get Stockman amped up beyond what he's originally wanting to do, but they'll abandon that very quickly. Unlike Stockman, Stockman's idea of what health is, is associated or vitality is associated with youth and overflowing and change as opposed to the more conservative position of preserving what you have. And that'll be carried over into the realm of values. Right. Because later Stockman is going to say the old values are like the decayed organic matter in the waters. They actually make us sick. They only have a lifespan of up to 20 years. And then we need new values to become healthy again. For the mayor, it's the old values which are the healthy things and the health producing values and the sorts of values that must be preserved because they're tried and true and also because they support this top down conception of health where the authorities look out for the well being of the people. For Stockman, it's bottom up, right. It's the young, it's those who are growing into the future. It's change. For the mayor, it's top down and it's let's keep things the same. 29:41 Erin: I wonder too if this also then goes along with this idea of using the sludge, using opposition as fuel. So it's sort of, you know, the doctor has this idea that the grit in the oyster is going to be something that produces ultimately greater strength. It's going to cause this energetic response that's going to then produce the revolutionary spirit that will result in an upheaval and a sort of cleansing. Whereas the mayor wants to get rid of the grit entirely so that things stay on that even keel, as I think you're, you're suggesting. 30:15 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this is the connection I was trying to make to what you were saying. And thanks for bringing us back there because it's important. What if there is nothing to resist and fight against? Right. What if it is just all good and then what do the young people do? Is there a form of vitality that doesn't involve yelling at your parents when you're a teenager and smoking pot and being rebellious and then overturning going to overthrow the system, man. Yeah. How do we express vitality if that's not available to us for whatever reason? 30:52 Erin: One heck of a pertinent question. What do we do except tear it all down and what do we put up in its place? But, but that's interesting, though, that, that these. That these two things are twins. Like, there's. One would think that a greater vitality and the sort of like, say the higher. Higher peaks of vitality that you're talking about with Stockman versus sort of like safe, subdued, you know, no, wa. That the mayor suggests, you know, that. That those peaks wouldn't go along with this grit in the oyster idea or this sludge idea. But maybe I'm being naive. Maybe in order to get those peaks, you need the. You need the troughs. But one would think that, that that kind of idea of vitality would not go along with. Would not go along with this toxicity. But of course, that's the immune response, for instance, you know. Right. We spike with vitality as a way to. As a way to kill the invasion, the infection of bacteria. Of course, this is why people, you know, when they feel they're on the brink of revolution and are trying to incite, you know, the population, they're hoping that the government behaves as badly as possible so that people will be the most fed up that they can be, so that the revolution will actually happen. Right. It sort of exists on that kind of energy. What can we make then? I mean, I don't know. I don't know the answer to this question myself, but what can we make then that. That of this rivalry piece. Both the doctor and the mayor come from the same family. You know, there's no, no talk of their parents. They seem to have sprung up out of nowhere. Both Mrs. Stockman and in a way, Captain Horster have paternal figures or the. Or the conspicuous absence of a paternal figure in their lives, which kind of hangs over the play. And this idea of inheritance seems. What you say about this, in a way, Stockman's idea about inheritance are rather conservative ultimately. No, I mean, in his family, he. He has two radically different personalities. His wife is the descendant of three generations of Tanners, which Stockman married into. I don't know. There. There just seem to be two different tracks. We have this idea of health and of. Of preserving the present self, and then we have this idea of lineage. And what in our present selves do we owe? All of these things seem to be knotted up, and the sibling rivalry and this idea of genetics, but I don't know how to. So I'm just throwing a lot of things at you. I'm not sure how to untangle all of that. 33:21 Wes: Yeah. He'll accuse the mayor of being a spiritual mongrel. And then we have to ask the question, right, well, why isn't Stockman a spiritual mongrel? And then you wonder, well, which is the older sibling? And you think, well, the mayor seems kind of like the older siblings sibling because he's more controlling and grown up. But in a way it would be funnier and maybe truer if he's the younger sibling fighting to be the. In Stockman and his older brother, he has not the most stable of father figures, if there ever was that. Right. If there's a bit of a gap in their ages, for instance, which might explain some difference in character. And then you have kind of this goofy person as your secondary father figure and then overreact, becoming this kind of hard ass, tight ass, which is what the mayor is. Either way you go, yeah, you think about an interesting family dynamic in which these two different versions of the principle of vitality have shunted themselves into two different branches, right, let's say of the same tree. And we know that these are two fundamental tendencies that we have to honor. In some sense they reflect a tension within the human psyche and we can't really ultimately discard either one of them. Right. So the more conservative instinct and the idea of relying on the values of a previous generation, which includes all the formative influences and includes culture, which is one of the things that Stockman will appeal to at the end. High culture, that all comes from the past, but also it includes, as I've said, the rear guard action of trying to heal people who are sick with the spa, but then also the financial element. So the well being of the community can. Can be measured to some extent in terms of economics, which is boring and dry, and it's the taxpayers and the housing association and all that nonsense. And it seems almost those sorts of material conditions seem like a demeaning thing to focus on, unless you're focusing on the deprivation of the proletariat and the need for revolution to equalize this disparity between them and the authorities. One of the things I like about this play is with the way these two principles just sort of break off into these two different sibling characters. And they are siblings in important ways and they have this dynamic interaction that you were pointing to, which is that Stockman's version of vitality, which involves youthfulness and growth and progress, also involves fighting against a reaction to what has come before. Right. He says, I think you've already quoted this, but he says, I have an infinite number of things to work and fight and to fight for. That's one of the things he's so excited about, being back in his hometown. And then the question is, yeah, can you find a form of vitality that doesn't necessarily involve that sort of fight? The other aspect of Stockman's version of vitality involves. It's another kind of overflowing, I think, which involves his prolificness as a writer and just wanting to spout every opinion that he has. So it's about speech, right? And that could be political speech. That could be revolutionary, or it could be editorials complaining about the state of things, or however you want to think about it. It could be the thing that Hofstad and Billing are very focused on, speech for the sake of representing, let's say, politically disenfranchised. But it also can be what Stockman talks about at the end of the play, which is high culture. That's one form, ultimately, of vitality, the aesthetic, the artistic, which we don't hear a lot about in the play. But until Stockman is insulting people for being uncultured, insulting the masses for being uncultured, mongrels. One of the themes I revisit a lot in the podcast. But, yeah, as a form of sublimation, we get a. We get a possibility of a form of vitality which isn't necessarily part of either one of these two different poles, the defensive conservative instinct or the progressive instinct. It sort of transcends it, maybe. 37:51 Erin: I think you're pointing out for me a couple of things about Stockman which are quite confused and speak to the complexity of his character, perhaps, that we have. On the one hand, I love this idea that you're pointing to of how prolific he is and how he seems to always have something to sort of rally on about. And yet, at the same time, as I think you also pointed out, he's very easily contaged by other people's ideas. It's kind of funny how little true conviction politically he actually seems to have prior to Hofstad and Billing getting to him and convincing him that this could be the vehicle for revolution. So those two things seem to sort of work opposite each other. Like, we can imagine him as someone who writes a lot of editorials, and yet, at least in the play, and what we see of him taking up a cause on his own, it's not native to him. He becomes convinced of this idea that it speaks to a larger political problem over the course of the play, and only then does he espouse these types of revolutionary ideas. 38:52 Wes: Yeah, he's induced by. I think Billing is the more revolutionary of the two newspaper guys. Hofstad's a little bit more moderate in the beginning. Well, first of all, they get kind of contaged or induced by him. Everyone wants to get in on it. In my notes, I call them hop ons, right? You have Hofstad, Billing and Aslaksen. They all get contaged with the grandiose quality that Stockman has. Okay, I'm going to be. Now I'm an important person who's going to do something for the good of the community. They all get quite grandiose. But Stockman is carried along by this wave. Ironically, they're the ones. Billing is the one. Stockman's a little bit nervous when Billing is saying, rah, rah, rah, revolution. At first. He's carried along reluctantly at first, but he doesn't put up too much resistance. And then he's like, okay, yeah, I guess I'm a revolutionary, too. 39:45 Erin: That's right. Yeah. There's that conflict in Stockman, and then there's the other one which you're pointing to, which is this conflict between. And maybe you characterized it a bit differently, but there are conservative elements, it seems to me, of Stockman's at least of his way of life, certainly. I mean, he's not living like a bohemian. He has. He has his job at the SPA Institute. He has his private practice. He has a normal family life, a home life. And in fact, he's gone back to this unnamed town from being out in the wilderness. He's come back to it. And if anything, if the mayor and if the doctor have a parentage, it's the town itself, right? So in a way, the town is like the Howards end of. Of. Of the play. You know, it's the symbol of maybe all of Norway or of the past or just of society itself and determining where it'll go at the end. His last words are about standing alone. So he seems to want to remove himself from society, to stand outside it, to achieve this freedom. Of course, he's not alone. That's one of the problems is that he has this family that he's affecting with everything that he does. And we're all part of society. None of us can step outside of it. But he has this. This hatred of the masses and yet a certain reverence for, you know, as you said, culture, high culture, which is a result of civilization and of many of the things which he seems to be rallying against. And also his ideas of social Darwinism are Also I think ultimately a bit confused. He has this idea of a genetic inherited mongrelism in terms of some people are just not as good as other people, according to him. But then in the end he's going to take up this school idea which who knows if this will get, you know, catch on. Five minutes after this plays over, maybe he'll be on to another idea. But he has this idea that perhaps these mongrel children who would be in his school would somehow have some hidden ability which you know, maybe would speak to a Darwinian idea of genetic mutation. But still it's a bit. Yeah, it's just a bit confusing. 41:55 Wes: At a certain point he wants to explain himself and say he means this spiritually rather than literally with the genetics. But yeah, the reference to education is sort of in the same line as the hopefulness about the possibility of education at the end of the play is in line with the embrace of high culture and in the embrace of aesthetic speech. He doesn't embrace that, but I've introduced that idea. Embrace of the artistic. So the idea is that it's another bottom up idea. Right. It's not like revolution exactly, but bottom up idea is that you educate people to make them amenable to good government. This is a current theme philosophically as well. Right. Schiller wrote letters on an aesthetic education that the idea there is that revolution is not going to work if people aren't ready for it, if they don't have the virtues, if they don't have the character that you need for that. And that's why the French Revolution turned out so badly. That was the idea. So in the end you get a different. It's a more elitist conception of a bottom up approach, which is that you have to educate people. We can't just have top down authority. We can't just force society to be good if people in their characters are not good. But we can do it from the bottom up. We can make good citizens through the right sort of education. So what it does is it really reveals that there's this elitist tendency within Stockman's conception of vitality that very much resembles his brother. His brother in the beginning, the mayor is slagging off the inferiors, the peasants. I think he accuses Hofstad of not having any tact because he's of peasant stock. And so you can see in, in the beginning Stockman is very pro masses. And then when he feels insulted, he switches and the elitist tendency comes out. But the idea of education is a more positive possibility. That flows out of that elitist component. 43:58 Erin: Yeah, that's good. I think with this idea of hop ons as well. I love that term. The reason why we have people very, very quickly, you know, I think you've demonstrated well that Stockman sort of switches a bit, but, you know, everyone in the play ultimately will switch position except for the mayor. Is that right? And, and Horster, you know, everyone eventually will flip and join a different side. And I think part of the reason why that is is because maybe Petra, it's pretty constant. That's right, Petra. Petra is pretty constant too. 44:31 Wes: Like a rock. Sorry. 44:35 Erin: Yeah, but that doesn't work because the mayor's name is Peter too, so. Well, actually, no, it does because they both. They're both similarly. There you go. That's because I was wondering why is her name. 44:46 Wes: She's stable, right? 44:48 Erin: Yeah, but they're both. They both don't move. That's good because I kept trying to find the connection why they would have the same name. But maybe the reason for that flip flopping is regardless of party or one's ideas about the solution to the problem, you know, everyone pretty much treats the sludge, or whatever we want to call it as a symbol. No one really treats it like a real problem. It just immediately becomes the cudgel with which everyone is going to push through their own agenda. It's. It's a rhetorical device that's being used by every character to make some kind of point. And so none of the character seems to actually care about the threat to health that this sludge potentially, I mean, if we're gonna take Stockman's word for it, that it potentially represents, and therefore this idea of the masses and of the people, you know, that too is kind of used very symbolically. I mean, the idea that the doctor is the enemy of the people too, seems to me to be signaling this. You know, we don't actually care that, that people, that real people who live in this town are going to get sick from these waters. Rather, we care about the people as an idea used as support or in defense of certain values or against certain values. Because Stockman, from the very beginning, as we've already said, he's delighted, he seems delighted to have found this problem. And one of the reasons why he's discovered this problem is because people have already been getting sick. That seems to be the last thing on everyone's mind. 46:27 Wes: This is another thing that makes it a bit suspect because he says, at first I thought they were bringing the sickness with them, which makes sense. Right. They're sick when they come. So how do you know that they're getting sick? From the. It's a bit. He thinks he's discovered this incredible reversal. What is supposed to make healthy is making sick. And the people don't. They may come sick, but they leave sicker. 46:48 Erin: Right. 46:49 Wes: So, yeah, I think in light of what you've been talking about with the hop ons, let's just visit of those moments. I think let's visit in our second half. We're going to stop here for the first half, but in the second half we'll visit the point where maybe we can pull out a few quotes from where Stockman delivers his news just to kind of justify what we've been saying about his mania. Because maybe, I don't know if this reading is going to get on people's nerves where we're so, so hard on Stockman and we're not just reading him as a hero, but anyway. And then we could look at those moments where other people get induced by him with revolutionary fervor and turn this right, turn the concrete issue about the pollution of the waters into something that's mainly symbolic. Right. Mainly a tool for fighting a kind of partisan political war. Listeners can listen to that right now. patreon.com subtextpodcast or you can wait a week and listen for free. Thank you, thank you. 48:05 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Listen to more episodes of (post)script at Patreon. Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “The Great Gatsby”; the ongoing development of our approach to the discussions; Arnold Rothstein and the fixing of the 1919 World Series; Fitzgerald’s neighbors on Long Island, including Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn; the contemporary feel of the novel; the NYC movie-making scene in the early 20th century; Marilynne Robinson; and possibilities for the next episode, where because of a weird time warp we talk as if “A Woman Under the Influence” will follow “The Great Gatsby” when it has always already preceded it. Transcript 0:00 Erin: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 0:07 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. So we just got done talking about the Great Gatsby. How do you think that went? 0:12 Erin: I think it went pretty well. I mean, there's always a lot more to say, unfortunately, and things that occur to me as I'm reading where I say to myself, gotta mention that on the show. And then probably I'll remember what those things are later. But I still think we got to a really good sampling. 0:26 Wes: I thought it went well. I wasn't as over prepared as I am sometimes. So listeners can give us feedback on what they like, but we were trying to figure out what works. So we're trying different approaches. So with this one, we decided to. We would start in medias res anywhere we liked, and we would roam about the text as we liked and not give too much synopsis, assume readers had read it and really talk less to the listener than to each other, and let the listeners be eavesdroppers. Eavesdropping on the eavesdroppers. That's an interesting way to put it. Eavesdropping on the conversation. And I like that. I think that works well. I hadn't thought through as many of the things that I wanted to think through as I have in some of the previous episodes, but I think that can work really well. Sometimes. Thinking out loud and not being too. Or thinking in the moment and not being too wedded to my notes and to some agenda. I come away from an episode like this feeling like I've learned something from you and from the whole process of being inspired with some thoughts and ideas as the episode goes on, which I like. 1:32 Erin: Yeah, I like that too. I always learn something from you, though, even if you have notes or whatever, you know, likewise. Unfortunately, I. Yeah, I rely far too often on the strength of my own memory, which can be really good, but there is a limit to it. 1:47 Wes: Yeah, no, that's the thing. You do have a great memory and I. I think I'd have a better memory if I weren't. 1:52 Erin: If you were more lazy like me and didn't do as much. 1:55 Wes: Well, the more obsessional you get and the more detailed, you know, like me trying to outline chapters. And it is actually better. I mean, I'm learning as we do this, like, what the best way to prepare for these sorts of conversations is because we have a limited amount of time and the quality of the podcast relies on our spontaneity. You can't be completely spontaneous and unprepared. So it's really. It's. 2:18 Erin: It's a hard balance. 2:19 Wes: It's hard. A hard balance. You know, you can kill some of the vitality. Thinking back to Myrtle again, can kill some of the vitality by overthinking it. But, yeah, if you're too spontaneous, then it's formless and you don't get a chance to really think through some of the things you might want to say about a book like this. There's so much to say. 2:39 Erin: Well, like, for instance, which it occurred to me after we had this kind of meta conversation while we were recording, I really wanted to talk more about the 1919 World Series. And then I was thinking. And then I was thinking, oh, I could just talk about that on the after show. That's what this is made for, for me to talk baseball. So the thing that I love about Wolfsheim's character is that he's supposed to be Arnold Rothstein, who was a real guy who really did fix the 1919 World Series, the Black Sox scandal, where Cincinnati Reds overtook the highly favored Chicago White Sox, then christened the Black Sox afterwards. But anyway, I just. I love the fact that that is the association that Fitzgerald wants us to make with the kind of person that we. Wolfsheim, is. Because the 1919 scandal represented, I think, a kind of a loss of innocence similar to the Kennedy assassination. I mean, and I don't want to overstate it, but this was the loss of innocence, I think, that led to the 20s in the way that the Kennedy assassination, or maybe in 68, like the student riots and the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations kind of led to the late 60s and 70s. So I think it's important maybe that during all of these kinds of, like, I don't know. I have. I have a rough idea about this. I haven't really thought it through all the way, but the ways in which these eras of decadence are preceded by a loss of innocence is really important. So the Black Sox scandal really just kind of brought to light something that already existed in baseball for a long time, which is the idea of fixing things. The idea of gambling was actually part of baseball's culture from the beginning. But then once it became big business, and there was this idea of making baseball this hallowed institution with American heroes like Shoeless Joe, who Babe Ruth borrowed his batting stance from Shoeless Joe Jackson, who's considered the ultimate power hitter of his day. And Ruth modeled his swing after Shoeless Joe's. So this idea that when baseball was kind of overtaken by money and these magnates and this big business, that it was then somehow above reproach. And it was invested with all of these spiritual qualities. I mean, some of which are inherent to the game of baseball because it's a beautiful game and everything else. But, like, once people realized that there was this sort of, you know, money making opportunity, it became almost like Hollywood, where suddenly we have to have moral messages imbued in the movies and we have to make sure everything is quote, unquote, on the up and up. And really, of course, behind the scenes, it's just as rotten as it ever was. And then, you know, the veil drops. Anyway, sorry, I have just had that spiel trapped in my system and I needed to get it out. 5:13 Wes: But anyway, no, that's. That's good. When I was looking into the background this. I ended up pulling up a page, a Wikipedia page on Rothstein, right? You look at his life, and then he was gunned down early on. It's like a really kind of like a classic mobster type of lifestyle. And I thought, wow, I gotta read more about this guy. And then I scrolled down to see where he's been represented in film or tv. So I guess it was, have you seen Boardwalk Empire? Apparently he. 5:39 Erin: I haven't. 5:41 Wes: Okay. So I'm not sure how prominent a role he plays in that or what kind of role he plays in that. But anyway, yeah, it made me really want to learn more about what I thought was actually looking at his bio. Like, there's got to be a film, right? Someone's got to have done a film about this guy. And so that's when I looked down to all that stuff. But the other thing that interested me in the background to this is just the extent to which it's based on Fitzgerald's own life and he lived on Long island, and the new money people were actually like writers and Hollywood people. Not Hollywood people, but writers and film people. So Ring Lardner, who I thought, yeah, Erin must know who that is, because I don't. I've heard the name, but he was a short story writer and apparently he was highly thought of by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others. And somehow he got rich doing it. I don't know, ended up in that community. But Blue Fields, Ed Wynn. Yep, these are people. I just don't really, you know, this is all new to me, all this stuff. So. 6:46 Erin: Well, Ring Lardner's expertise extended to baseball, and he was actually one of the, you know, his Accounts of the Black Sox scandal were some of the most famous accounts. And he in particular felt really betrayed by that instance. But, yeah, these were all personalities. Like, I don't know who would be the equivalent today. The only name I could think of is Maureen Dowd, though, you know, a columnist with a particular air about her or him, as is always the case in with Fitzgerald's friends, except for Zelda, with this particular panache writing for these top papers, it was really kind of like a golden age. The twenties of the column as an art form, maybe. 7:25 Wes: Interesting. 7:25 Erin: And a lot of these prose stylists, like Damon Runyon, for instance, who wrote these popular stories, there was an appreciation for the effort and the flair that actually went into those. 7:37 Wes: You're reminding me of the fact that the novel. I was surprised how contemporary the novel seems. Part of it is just these sorts of a mob character like Wolfsheim is just. That's a contemporary trope as well. It's not dated in any way, even though we might associate it with a particular era. It's part of our cultural vocabulary. But otherwise I was with all the cars zipping around, I thought, okay, I want to see. And they're going over the bridge, I think, is it the Queensborough Bridge that they go over? At one point, I wanted to see, all right, well, what do cars. I'm thinking, is it still Model T, Ford stuff, or is it more advancement? No, so it's. Cars look quite different by 1922. And I thought, they're talking about going to the movies or just reading the background. I was kind of thinking, God, it's amazing that people were getting famous for being in movies right before there was even sound. Or is there sound at this point? 8:31 Erin: Oh, absolutely. 8:32 Wes: And this was a hundred years ago. I'm just thinking. And yet the way the characters talk about all of this stuff, it just has the same quality as the way we would talk about it today. And then New York, what the kind of feelings that New York inspires. You know, there's that great scene going over the bridge where he describes that. Unfortunately, we didn't get to it on the regular podcast, but everything feels contemporary to me. It doesn't actually feel dated, even though the novel and the films based on it. Right. Are. The novel is an away period novel, and any adaptation of it will play that up. It feels so surprisingly contemporary. 9:06 Erin: It's important to know that, too, that. I mean, early, early Hollywood, the silents, people like Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand and all those great figures. Early Hollywood was not Hollywood. It was New York City, you know, it was an outgrowth of Broadway. There were a lot of studios in. Not a lot of studios, but there was, you know, there was movie making going on in New York. 9:26 Wes: Interesting. So I didn't know that. 9:28 Erin: Yeah. And then eventually it became, you know, transported to a place where you could have backlots with better weather and, you know, more controlled environment. But, yeah, you know, it's funny too. Like, I was thinking about. So one of the things I really hate about modern day Hollywood is just the nepotism inherent in so much of it, how so many of our young actors today are actors by right of birth. So it's interesting now how that Hollywood people maybe now are considered like, old money. I mean, you know, there's no grander name than Barrymore, you know, among the Hollywood elites. And, you know, so I just. I wonder how long it's gonna take for Drew Barrymore's kids to get into acting or. So it's interesting too, how, you know, just by having a certain staying power. Like, I wonder if all these East Eggers are, you know, kind of rolling in their graves over the fact that now the most exclusive parts of the Hamptons have been taken over by the younger generations who would have been West Eggers, all of these Hollywood people. The Gwyneth Paltrows. You know, people are always surprised to know that Gwyneth Paltrow is the daughter of a movie star in her own right. Blythe Danner? 10:30 Wes: Yeah, I had no idea. 10:31 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, they all come from storied backgrounds. Just to say that our perception of old money or of that kind of aristocratic heritage really does change over time. 10:40 Wes: Yeah. And he says he loves the idea of rotating between essays, film poems and narrative literature. And then he talks about Marilynne Robinson having some essays. And I've always been a big fan of Marilynne Robinson. 10:58 Erin: Oh, me too. 10:59 Wes: How about you? Yeah. So the Death of Adam. Have you read that book and those essays? 11:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that would be great. 11:06 Wes: So, yeah, that will go on the list. That's a good idea. I think I put her name on the list, but it's good to be reminded. Like when I was brainstorming what essayists we would read. I mean, we could read a novel of hers as well, too, of course. 11:19 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 11:20 Wes: And we do have some new patrons to thank. Elizabeth, Michael, Mary and Amor Amour has a Cupid as a profile picture. 11:32 Erin: That's great. 11:33 Wes: Could be Cupid himself. You never know. So, for our next episode, what are we doing next? 11:40 Erin: I don't know. That's a good question. 11:43 Wes: All right, let's find out. I'm already bound to a spreadsheet. It's not really up to me anymore. It's up to the spreadsheet. I guess we have some choice in this. Let's look at some of the possibilities here. Possibly A Streetcar Named Desire. No. Why not? 11:59 Erin: Oh, well, I mean, you know, eventually. I don't know if I could take that. So much American ness in that. 12:05 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. Well, there's Billy Budd, Annie Hall, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. 12:10 Erin: Oh, you know what I was thinking, though? 12:12 Wes: Or Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. 12:13 Erin: Yeah, right, right. Maybe we want to do. Maybe we want to stick to things that are more mainstream, like you said for the first ones. But I was thinking Woman under the Influence. 12:22 Wes: Yeah. Maybe we could do that. I don't think it matters. 12:25 Erin: Are you sure? Because I want to give us as much of a chance as possible. 12:28 Wes: You know, I think we should throw in, you know, wild card, off the beaten path stuff. 12:34 Erin: Okay. 12:34 Wes: Once in a while, even in the beginning, and. Yeah. Because that's been on my mind. So we should just do that next. 12:39 Erin: I know. Well, you know, it's just. It's one of those things, like, you think you're getting Mexican food, someone suggests Chinese food, and then you just have to think about Chinese food for a second, then you're in the mood for Chinese food. I don't know. Anyway, so I could adjust elsewhere, but since I just listened to our postscript episode where we mentioned that, I thought that was, like, the Mexican food that's on the brain now. 12:58 Wes: Okay. 12:59 Erin: Or the Greek food, as the case may be, for Cassavetes. 13:01 Wes: Ah, yes. 13:02 Erin: So, all right. 13:03 Wes: Good. 13:03 Erin: Great. 13:03 Wes: So let's do that. 13:04 Erin: Okay. 13:05 Wes: All right. Well, once again, thank you. 13:08 Erin: Thank you.

Hard to believe that Subtext has been around for five years, and Gatsby for 100. To celebrate these anniversaries (and our hiatus in recordings for a long summer vacation), here’s a re-release of one of our early episodes (from November 2020). We all know this story, in part because it captures a period that will always have a special place in the American imagination. Prosperous and boozy, the Jazz Age seemed like one great party, held to celebrate the end of a terrible world war; the liberating promise of newly ubiquitous technologies, including electricity, the telephone, and the automobile; and a certain image of success as carefree, inexhaustibly gratifying, and available to all who try. And yet perhaps this fantasy is rooted in disillusionment, and a denial of inescapable social realities, including the impossibility of genuine social mobility. What do we mean when we talk about the American Dream? Is it realistic? Wes & Erin give an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”  Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.

What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without being consumed by them? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 classic “Jaws.” Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” “There Will Be Blood,” “As You Like It,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of of Jaws. Erin had just got done talking about this really interesting parallel between the bombing of the shark and the bombing of Japan. I think we are going to ready to buy now. It doesn't undersells it the way I just put it. I've reached part two and so my energy level has started to falter. Sorry for underselling that. 0:58 Erin: No, no, no. That's what it is, unfortunately. 1:01 Wes: But now we are going to talk about Hooper and this might re energize us. Or at least me. 1:07 Erin: Because you're a big Hooper fan. 1:09 Wes: Yeah. What were you gonna say about the class element? Well, he's a little breath of fresh air. He's a little. Don't you think so? Richard Dreyfuss is just. Oh yeah, he's energetic in the way that Brody isn't. And funny. The novelist, the guy who wrote the novel. Benchley. Peter Benchley. Right. By the way. And I looked at the novel. It's not a great novel, put it that way. It's not a literary masterpiece or something. And then he wrote three screenplays and naturally it's a very different craft. And then Spielberg brought in someone else to rewrite it and in the end had a friend, I forget the name, someone with more comic chops. He said to this guy, eviscerate it completely. Redo it, and then put some humor into this. This is the kind of thing that happened to the Die Hard script as well, by the way. And it's one of the things that makes the movie really work. And I think it's probably a good. Really, it helps any movie, almost any genre, doing this sort of thing. But. 2:11 Erin: And the improv too, we should say, right, that they also improvised and wrote. Wrote it down and incorporated it the next day. So that was pretty systematic too. Yeah. 2:21 Wes: But, yeah, Hooper is a big source of comic relief, I think. Right. He has some pretty funny lines. 2:29 Erin: Yeah. 2:30 Wes: I know that's not the thing that you are ready to talk about, but. 2:34 Erin: No, no, I'm not really ready to talk about anything with him because I'm not sure what the class thing is really about there. I mean, we have, you know, one of the other things that Jameson article talked about. It was also kind of about the Godfather, so I only read part of it. But the three main characters also kind of represent like the three ages of man, you know, youth, maturity and old age. And they also seem to represent three different classes, though maybe Quint and Brody are more. You know, they come from such different worlds. But maybe that maps out to be sort of roughly the same class or Brody maybe a little bit. A little bit higher up than Quint. But what's the significance of. For instance, Hooper, you know, the moment that's really sticks out to me is him bringing two bottles of wine to Brody's house. Like, why is that? That's such a curious thing to do. He brings both red and white. What's that about? You know, he seems. He seems unspoiled and eager to please for being upper class. So thinking through this, maybe Hooper and Quint are both aligned in their sense of guilt. If we're. If we're agreeing that Quint has some guilt going on, Hooper maybe is guilty over his wealth. And maybe that's a motivating factor for him to go out and study these Sharks and just sort of confront, front, like create the conditions under which he would be wrestling with real danger, real stakes in a way that his wealth perhaps has insulated him from otherwise. And maybe the bringing over of the two bottles of wine is indicative of his, of that guilt and of his desire to please and to be generous. 4:10 Wes: You know, he doesn't bring over a box of wine and he doesn't bring over some fancy, schmancy, expensive bottle of wine, but he doesn't know which wine they're going to prefer, so he hedges his bets by getting one of each. Or maybe he doesn't know which wine is going to go with dinner or something like that, right? So he's sophisticated enough to know that a white will go with some dishes and a red will go with others, but he hasn't asked them in advance. And so it's at the same time, you can see it as something, the kind of thing a wealthy person would do in the sense that it's, right, he's spending more money than he might have, but it's also a bit. There's a down to earth element of it, right. It wouldn't be the, you know, if you showed up to another snobby wealthy person's party with two bottles and said, I didn't know which one to get, you know, that would probably would be seen as maybe a bit of an unsophisticated thing to do. But in this context, right, he knows that it's not. He does, I think he comes across as. He's right, he's a trust fund kid, right, and he doesn't have to work and this is his hobby. And he does come across, I think, as a bit spoiled, you know, and he's got all that fancy equipment that Quint makes fun of him for and he's a bit green in various ways and he doesn't want to take orders and things like that. I mean, I think also, you know, overall he's very charismatic, likable, likable character. But you do get the sense he's a rich kid. It's not done to the point of caricature. So he's a complex character and he's not turned into a villain because of that. But it's quite a contrast to Quint. And the other contrast there is, he is, right, he is representative of the scientific impulse or of curiosity, which is the thing that you ultimately, therapeutically, you want to replace fear with curiosity. The curiosity towards sharks, right? That's the better comportment towards them than fear. So you have these three different. 6:11 Erin: Hold on, I'm writing this down. Okay, okay, I'm joking. 6:15 Wes: Oh, sorry. Like, wow, this is really that good? 6:20 Erin: No, I mean more like teach me not to be afraid of things. Okay, thank you. 6:26 Wes: Easier said than done. But, you know, although I have had these moments, right, in therapy where you take the edge off suffering by moving into the position of curiosity. But, yeah, not easy to do. But you might see that as the journey for Brody. And he's very excited. It's one of the few times you see him excited in the movies. Excited when he blows up the shark. He's excited when Hooper shows up. You could see this as maybe this is the kind of thing that I could have done, but I didn't do something like that. But in any case, I was going to say three impulses represented in Quint, vengeance, perhaps in Hooper, scientific curiosity. In Brody, fear, resignation, depressiveness. Something like that. And in the end, so he's reluctantly invited by Quint to do the thing that he doesn't want to do, which is to destroy the shark. He's not really that into the idea of hunting down and destroying sharks, but he's forced in that position in the end. And he obviously gets a big thrill out. I guess not getting eaten is pretty thrilling. I don't know which is more thrilling, getting eaten or not getting eaten. 7:40 Erin: Yeah, well, they seem to have forgotten that Quint was just eaten because there's, you know, it's so, like a straightforward win at the end. 7:50 Wes: They don't shed a lot of tears. 7:52 Erin: No. 7:54 Wes: Before they start paddling home. 7:56 Erin: Exactly. Just high five each other. And Brody is like. Brody is also spitting out the bloody water. He has a taste of shark blood there. It's like the sharks get. Get gotten the taste of human blood. That just grossed me out watching that. That he's, you know, you could see the blood in the water and he's like. Has his mouth open in it and spitting it out. Oh, yeah. That has nothing to do with anything. Sorry, but I'm always just like. Much of that is Quint's blood. I wonder. Anyway, Kid. Flying through the air anyway. 8:31 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the shark has a lot of people in his stomach, right? 8:36 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 8:37 Wes: Blowing out all those people, but not whole people. 8:40 Erin: That's. That's the other sick thing about the shark that I meant to say. He doesn't eat the whole person. Like, he just takes bites here and there and he leaves. 8:49 Wes: He only likes certain cuts. Yeah. I'll have the filet mignon, please. Yeah. So curiosity. Weird. And scientific impulse. That's the thing that I was associating with Hooper. And so script might have made more out of this. Right. Because you got these three characters on the boat. You might have had Hooper pulling him in one direction and saying, no, we should tag it and study it. And he does tag the shark at a certain point. Right. He sneaks the tag onto the. The barrel or something. I don't know. Or onto the. That's what I thought Hooper was doing at some point. He's trying to do something scientific at the same time because I think maybe he thinks that they're not going to actually be able to kill it or something. But. So you could have made more out of this conflict and you could have had Brody pulled in these two different directions. I don't think it would have worked, of course, but that would have thematically done more and might have even added more tension in some ways. And Brody's arc, I don't think, is to go either the Hooper direction or the Quint direction, really. Although he does seem to get. Have overcome his fear of water in the end. But getting back to Hooper, because I think that's. Yeah, I don't think you had your full say on that, but. 10:04 Erin: Yeah, no, no, he just, you know, he's also done away with during that. During the final confrontation. So it really is just man versus Beast. 10:14 Wes: Yeah. 10:15 Erin: Not men versus beast at the end. The fact that he has that whole missed opportunity with the harpoon and the hypodermic needle or whatever it is, you know, and ends up being off screen for the final moments or the climactic moment. 10:32 Wes: He's always dropping critical things. You know, he drops the tooth. 10:36 Erin: That's right. 10:37 Wes: He drops the hypodermic. 10:40 Erin: Yeah. I don't know. There's some crucial way in which that that's not going to be the thing. It's going to be the gun. The gun and the. And the air tank, which got some heavy criticism in this house for its. Sure, shark wouldn't blow up that way. 10:55 Wes: Well, apparently he can't really blow up a tank with a gun like that. And also, why is he just holding it in his mouth? So I'm just gonna hold the thing in his mouth for that long. 11:08 Erin: I know. 11:08 Wes: I understand why they like that idea and wanted to make that work. But it's fun. It's fun to see the shark blow up in the end. 11:18 Erin: Yeah. 11:18 Wes: What else are you gonna do? I mean, it's. Is it. Is it just gonna die slowly of its injuries and sink to the bottom of the ocean. 11:25 Erin: Is that how it was initially killed? How it was, or rather how it was killed in the book? 11:30 Wes: I actually don't remember. I don't know how it's killed in the book. It's probably just shot. But yeah, I don't. I mean, the scuba thing is. I think that was Spielberg's idea. Yeah. 11:39 Erin: Tiring it out is how you do, how you deal with the sperm whale. That's the Nantucket sleigh ride. 11:45 Wes: The shark took a lot of bullets and a lot of harpoons, I think. I don't know that it would have really survived it. 11:52 Erin: Well, in the end, it's a group effort. I mean, I guess, you know, they get there by virtue of quintessential Quint's boat, though. He makes it so that they, you know, they can't contact any help. And then it's the tank, which is a. Which is a Hooper contribution, and he has the equipment that he puts on the boat and then the. Then the gun. So there's something of another elemental clash in the. I was sort of imagining in part one that the beach is about like the being on the borderline between elements, I suppose. You know, the fact that the shark is blown up with air, like air defeats water. The visible somehow, like defeating the. The obscured or the hidden and then, I guess, you know, science defeating nature or something. You know, all of these things, I think, are inherent in that tank idea. But it's funny that it needs the detonation of the. Of a gun. It's like hillbilly fishing or something. Like, just like shooting a shooting fish in the water. Anyway. 12:50 Wes: Well, he seemed to have the idea in the beginning that he was going to use his pole, which was pretty funny. 12:55 Erin: Right? Right. 12:56 Wes: I think they already knew how big the shark was at that point. Right. 25ft. 13:00 Erin: Right. 13:00 Wes: Actually, once caught a shark, deep sea fishing. 13:03 Erin: Wow. 13:04 Wes: Small shark, little baby shark. Like maybe four feet or something. But yeah, I'd gone out on this boat and I was very seasick and everyone around me was catching all these, like, red fish, I forget what they're called. And just having a great time, and I was catching nothing. I'm like, what's wrong with me? Why am I failing at this? Like, we're fishing in the same ocean. I'm not catching any fish. And then finally I got something on the reel and then I started. I'm like, this is pretty heavy. Start reeling it up. And then you see the shark coming out of the water and your first impulse is to. To like, okay, well, let Me go backwards on the real. I'm not reeling. And then. And then. But another part of you is like, this is the only thing I've caught all day, and it's probably the only thing I'm gonna catch. So he's coming up, bringing the shark up no matter what. 13:56 Erin: Wow. 13:56 Wes: And then, you know, got to take the picture with it and then threw it back. 14:01 Erin: Nice. 14:02 Wes: But it's a weird experience. Yeah. You have a feeling of being connected. I haven't done a lot of fishing, but. But in that moment, you know, you feel connected to something very primordial. It's almost a hypnotic quality. But. Yeah, I don't think you're gonna pull out a 25 foot. Sure, get the guns. 14:22 Erin: Yeah, it's gonna pull you out. 14:25 Wes: Right. 14:26 Erin: Right off the dock. 14:27 Wes: It's gonna pull you in. 14:29 Erin: Pull you in. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. To go back to the air tank for a second, I was also thinking about the floaties on the. On the beach. The raft, you know, the inflatable raft. And that great image of the raft being caught in the surf and, like, tumbling because the. The bite was taken out of it. Oh, my gosh. The dog. Okay, I did not know that a dog was killed in this film. That really upset me. That was. Oh, you could do anything you want, but don't kill dogs. Yeah, the dog is. 14:56 Wes: The dog was actually killed. 14:58 Erin: Yeah. 14:58 Wes: Oh, fictionally. 15:00 Erin: Oh, yeah, Obviously. Yeah. 15:02 Wes: Wait, I didn't think the dog. That. The dog was eaten. Yeah. They're calling because he can't find the dog. 15:06 Erin: Calling for the dog. Yeah. So sad. 15:08 Wes: You think the shark got the dog and the boy? And one. 15:11 Erin: Oh, yeah, Just two. Two different appetizers in one. One bite. Double fisting it. 15:21 Wes: Well, the dog is the appetizer. The boy is the main course. 15:25 Erin: Light. Light main course. He's small. Anyway, back to the beach. I'm just thinking about. I'm just thinking about the mayor. I love that actor, Mr. Robinson. Great character actor. Murray Hamilton, you know, so we. We have this whole enemy of the people. This is a preview, I guess, for our next episode. But we have this whole enemy of the people element in the first part of the film. And then it's as though the pollution becomes a charismatic megafauna that then, like, everybody is obsessed with that. That. That steals focus and becomes the main character, the pollution itself, you know, but we have this whole. This whole idea of the greed of this guy who doesn't want the resort town to become. You know, I'm pretty sympathetic to this, you know, you don't want your entire. Like, his motivations are he shouldn't be killing people. People should be getting out of the water. But his. His motivations are justified, which is that this entire town exists off of the proceeds that they get in the summer. Right. The revenue that comes in in the summer from tourism. This could potentially just bankrupt the entire town. I don't know. What could we say about him? The scene where he's encouraging people to go in the water. And that older couple that he talks to that I mentioned in part one. The guy's a really good actor. So terrifying when they all. Encourages them all to go. And of course, he's. He's in his sport jacket and doesn't go in himself. Yeah. We have this funny instance of Hooper dropping the tooth and then therefore, of the mayor sort of not having the smoking gun. 16:59 Wes: Right. 17:00 Erin: And then the. The sick vandalism is such a funny. Such a funny thing to say about the fact that they drew the shark fin on the billboard. It's the sick vandalism, like. And she just, you know, you expect it to be like, you know, like a phallus that somebody's drawn on this billboard. And instead it's the fin on the woman's face. It's like her eyes, I think, are bugging out and it says, help in a little. 17:27 Wes: Yeah, that's great. And we've seen that sign before, earlier in the movie. So we see it in its pristine state, and then we see it vandalized. 17:34 Erin: Right. And she's on a rat. She's on an inflatable raft. Right? In that image? 17:38 Wes: I think so. 17:39 Erin: Yeah. 17:40 Wes: But it's. Yeah. Sick vandalism. That is a deliberate mutilation of a public service message. Now I want those little paint happy bastards caught and hung up by their buster Browns. 17:51 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 17:52 Wes: So this is a convergence of the theme of vandalism and Brody's function in the town to keep vandals at bay. Right. So to keep up appearances, in other words. And here's something real happening, and Brody's trying to deal with it, but he's being redirected to the appearances, which is very interesting. So we were talking a little bit before about helplessness, and Brody nominally is an authority figure as the chief of police, but he's lacking in all. He really doesn't have any authority because the mayor and the town council control everything. I think he's right. When he's confronted about closing down the beaches, Vaughn, the mayor says, martin, you gonna shut down the beaches on your own Authority. And he says, well, what other authority do I need? Well, technically, you need a civil ordinance or resolution by a board of selectmen. That's just going by the book. And then it's your first summer, you know. So the idea that they're not native islanders converges with the idea that he actually doesn't have much authority except to deal with nuisances and vandals, such that they can keep up the appearances and keep up the community life that they have. Which I'd be pretty depressed in that situation as well. If he's coming from whatever he was doing as a New York City cop on one beat or another, if he thought this were a promotion, if he thought this were a kind of step up, he must have had a rude awakening at some point to find out that not only is he dealing with these petty concerns, but he also doesn't have that much authority. And I think that is connected ultimately to this theme of helplessness. The helplessness of sometimes in the face of our own impulses, the helplessness of being in the water with something unseen that can grab us and eat us. Even dismemberment, right, is a very good visual representation of helplessness because our limbs are what allows us to move and to do things. So to be unlimbed. It's part of the terror of getting killed by a shark as dismemberment. We see the leg fall to the bottom of the ocean at one point. And I think part of that is about being deprived of power, or it's about being helpless. It's about being humiliated, even in some ways. It's about. So even if you live through a shark attack, right, you might not have legs, or you might be missing one leg or an arm. Your ability to take care of yourself, your ability to move, your ability to physically function in the world is going to be compromised. So in a way, he's already at the point where we begin the movie. Brody has already been not dismembered, but not neutered, which is the next thing I wanted to say. But his authority has been softened. His efficacy in the world is not as high as it maybe he thought it would be, or maybe as it was in certain ways in New York. New York is dangerous. New York is unsafe, he says. In this town, it's completely safe. He's nothing to worry about. Your wife saying be careful to you is just a joke. But it also means there's less to do. It's less meaningful, it's less interesting, it's safe, but it's not exciting. So that's why I wanted to get. Yeah. Get to this idea of loss of efficacy and the way the sharks. The danger of the shark as representing that loss of efficacy. 21:27 Erin: Or I agree with you. But to push back against this, because can't we also read him as the reverse of that, as the shot in the arm that this town needs? Because without him, they would all be, you know, the town itself, as helpless as he is. The town itself is also, it seems to me, suffering under maybe something like a problem of decadence or of unreality. Like there are indications that we get that this town is a bit insulated. 21:56 Wes: Insular. 21:57 Erin: It's insulated. It's insular, but it's also a bit. Maybe it's a bit dilapidated or it's not dilapidated. That's too strong a word. Its defenses are down, and that's part of the problem. So Brody comes in, his defenses are up, and that's what makes him the right person for this job. I mean, visually. So we have, like, the fencing is a pervasive, like, visual theme in the film. So we have Brody's own white picket fence. Looks a little bit dilapidated. We have the fence that. What's her name? Is it Chrissy? Can't remember Chrissy, the woman from the beginning of the film that she and the guy run along. That's sort of jagged, which is indicative of a seaside town. Like things. Things actually break down, wear down faster, right. Of course, because of the sea air, the salt in the air. So things decay or degrade faster there. 22:46 Wes: Everything's weathered. 22:47 Erin: Everything's weathered, right? And you have the kids. You have the kids karate chopping the picket fences, which, when you think about it, that's. This is a stretch. Now I'm. Now I'm really going out on a limb here. Pardon the pun, but, you know, you put your hand out straight, your palm out straight, right? And karate chop. And that's kind of a, you know, you put it on top of your head, it's like a fin, right? So there's something about the forces of decay that are within the town. The decadence of the town as represented by this mayor who's kind of like a smarmy and not the right person to lead the town. So, like, how did he get elected? You know, that leads. That both leaves the town vulnerable to the shark. But also, it seems like, you know, with the little boys karate chopping their own fences, they're leaving themselves vulnerable and open in certain crucial ways that seem to invite something like this to happen. Much as you're postulating that the shark is almost an extension of Brody's imagination, which I think is really compelling, it's almost also a kind of an invitation on the part of the town because their defenses are down. They're too much in the holiday mindset and not enough in the New York cop mindset. They're asking for trouble by existing in that kind of holiday space where nothing bad can really happen. So you're gonna go in the water anyway, even if there's a killer shark on the loose. Something. Something along those lines. 24:18 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he finds some efficacy as the film goes on, but at the point in the beginning where he's just. Right. Dealing with people's complaints and telling his. I guess it's his secretary, something about paperwork. You know, she's got to keep certain things off his desk if the new filing system is to work or something like that, and where you get complaints. And this is one of the charms of the movie. In the beginning, as he's going around town, he's having various people complain to him about one petty thing or another. So at that point, that seems to me would be a depressing contrast to a higher stakes job. The stakes are lower. It's safer. Seemed to be. It turns out it's not. And so one's efficacy is lower in that sense. One is not as powerful. Not just in the sense that the town is run by the mayor at this point. His authority may increase with time, of course. Right. The longer he's there, even if he never becomes an islander, you could expect that his authority would increase. But it's not just in that sense. It's just in the sense that he has less to do. So he's less powerful because less is at stake. 25:18 Erin: Right. 25:19 Wes: And then more becomes at stake. And so his power is gradually returned. Although, again, I think he remains quite passive until the very end of the film. He's being ordered around by Quint, essentially, for most of the second half of the film. Right. 25:33 Erin: And he has to take the fall for, you know, when. When the Kitcher kid's mother confronts him. I think it's Kintner, Kitner, some K name that Alex is the kid's name. Right. When Alex's mother confronts Brody and he. You know, there's just this, like, really painful moment where he just has to. Or he just kind of accepts her criticism. I mean, there's. There's nothing you can do, really, to fight back in that scenario. And she just has to. She's a grieving mother. 26:02 Wes: Well, the Mayor says she's full of it. And then Brody says, no, she's right, Right, right, right. 26:08 Erin: But he doesn't say to her, I mean, it would be absurd to do so, but he, he doesn't say, listen, I tried, you know, whatever, whatever he, he might have said in his own defense, partially because one, one can't say anything and because she needs to just express her grief, but partially because it seems like this ineffectuality that's sort of the peak of it, the peak of his helplessness in the face of even of criticism for interventions that he was actually trying to make and couldn't. 26:36 Wes: Yeah, he could have blamed it on the mayor at that point. 26:39 Erin: Right. 26:39 Wes: He says nothing. The mayor says, I'm sorry, Martin, she's wrong. Martin says, no, she's not right. And then the mayor gives the order to cut the shark down without looking at the contents of its belly, which is crazy. Yeah. They catch a shark at this point near the midpoint of the movie, and of course it's the wrong shark. 26:58 Erin: But yeah, I feel sorry for that shark, actually. I do. It's a little hapless and a little. 27:05 Wes: Poor tiger shark's always getting blamed. 27:09 Erin: Well, you know, it's a victim too of this. The real, the quote unquote, real shark. It's more like an animal than the headliner shark is the Louisiana license plate in its stomach. It's like it sort of got lost or something. You know, what's it doing up here? It's a little hapless. 27:28 Wes: Well, this is one of the spectacles of the film is right after the news of the shark goes out. Mrs. Kintner has offered a reward. After people find that out, they come from all over to go out in fishing boats. Well, I wouldn't call them fishing boats. They go out on these tiny boats like, are you insane? Right? Going out in like rowboat sized boats to try to. And even Hooper makes fun of them. At some point. Yeah, they're all going to get killed. So they go out shark hunting and you get the sense that, yeah, this is the kind of response in a way that's unhelpful. And it's the kind of thing the film really. So I think we both looked at this documentary, Jaws at 50. Yeah. And one of the unfortunate. You know, Spielberg worked with shark conservationists when he made this movie and even got footage from them. There's not a lot of footage of real sharks the movie, but there is when, you know, the scene in the cage, for instance, that's real great white Shark footage. 28:29 Erin: That's a great advertisement for cage diving. 28:31 Wes: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so one of the unfortunate outcomes of this movie was to make people more scared of sharks and to increase the popularity of shark fishing. I think ultimately it was a boon because it. It also led to an interest in sharks. Right. So you have the Quint side and then you. The Hooper side. 28:51 Erin: The Right. 28:51 Wes: Aroused the Quint in people and it also aroused the Hooper. Ultimately, I think the Hooper went out more and the. Like, the major threat to sharks is from finning. Right. Fin soup. 29:05 Erin: It's disgusting. 29:06 Wes: Yeah, yeah. But you can see some of that kind of. Yeah. That knee jerk type of reaction when they go out just to catch a random shark and then say, oh yeah, this must be the shark. 29:17 Erin: Right. 29:18 Wes: It's a lynching. 29:19 Erin: Right. Yeah. And its peculiarity to be found in those waters and its size make it something they can pin things on. Yeah. But in addition to the tiger shark, you know, there's the dog. You mentioned in part one that it does seem like a typical horror film at the beginning because Chrissy is getting. Is getting eaten because of her sexuality or something. The rest of the victims. That doesn't seem to be the case. And Quint. Quint's getting eaten because that was his destiny, to get eaten. We might have expected Hooper to get eaten too, but Quint for sure. 29:53 Wes: Yeah, he is actually. I think him living is a last minute change to the script. 29:57 Erin: Oh, really? 29:58 Wes: And they changed it because the footage of real great whites they were able to get was with an empty cage and they wanted to use that. So they actually rewrote the script to have Hooper live to escape the cage first. But I think it's better. Yeah. So you might expect him to be killed. He's killed in the novel. He's killed even in a late iteration of the script. But then I think it's better if he survives him. 30:22 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, then you get an interesting outcome there, symbolically with law and order and tech defeating the shark. 30:33 Wes: You get two people paddling home in the end as opposed to one. 30:36 Erin: And that's always nicer. 30:38 Wes: Snarky. 30:39 Erin: It's nice to have company on your comment return. 30:42 Wes: I used to be afraid of the water. 30:44 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 30:44 Wes: I don't know why. 30:45 Erin: It is better. It is better. 30:47 Wes: It's like they're. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship moment. 30:51 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. 30:53 Wes: It's a great little. Great little ending, but. Yeah, but go ahead. 30:56 Erin: They walk off into the sunset and then Brody has a friend on the island. So he's, he's not alone anymore. 31:02 Wes: Hooper will stay, stick around and. 31:03 Erin: Yeah, he probably will. He doesn't have to go to Australia to see the great white there. There's one right there. Hopefully they'll get more sharks for him to. Then, then Hooper is trying to lure the sharks into. To Amity. 31:17 Wes: He's rich. He can have them, you know, air dropped. 31:20 Erin: There you go. 31:21 Wes: Have them transplanted. Another great white, I mean, obviously we don't need up here in Boston. You know, we don't like. Great whites are naturally here right off of Cape Cod and off of. Yeah. So they don't need to be imported, but. Yeah, go ahead, say something about victims. 31:41 Erin: The little boy seems like the, the most high profile of all the victims. And that seems to be because of the fact that Brody has two boys. I don't know what, what else we could say about that, you know, because the other, the other murders are kind of. Murders. Yeah. You know what I mean? They're kind of, they're, they're kind of, they feel like murders. They're. They're kind of glossed over, you know, like we never see Chrissy's family. We never see, you know, we don't see her, her mother throwing up, looking at her body in a little box. I mean, nobody would show. 32:13 Wes: I think this is one of the mother. 32:15 Erin: Those types of remains. 32:16 Wes: But yeah, was subjected to the. There's not, there's not any time spent trying to build up sympathy for the victims. I think even for the Kintner boy. 32:25 Erin: Yeah. 32:26 Wes: Maybe if you're cuter. Just kidding. 32:31 Erin: Well, and partially that seems like the function of the shark, like that's the randomness that it could be anybody. And so therefore it's kind of. We can't expect who it's going to be. It seems like that's about what the shark is about. It's also about the film building suspense. We don't know, you know, we haven't like built a relationship with this little boy and then he gets killed. And so we can kind of see it coming, you know, like, it seems part of the strategy of the way that the narrative is working and the horror is popping up randomly. 33:03 Wes: Yeah. I think in a horror movie, it's not about sympathizing with the victims. The violence is not moralized. So if it's in a good guy, bad guy film, it's important, Right, that we sympathize with the victims and that we hate the villains, the bad guys for doing what they're doing. It's important because when the bad guys get killed, we have to be able to enjoy that. The violence has to be moralized in that sense. There's no moralization here, because you can't do it with a shark as much as you might want to try. And it's not going to be thrilling seeing Jaws get it in the end as it is seeing what's his face fall off the building at the end of Die Hard. Hans Gruber. All right. Yeah. So it's not gonna. It's not gonna be. Although. What was. What was the shark's name? The model shark's name? It was Bruce. Bruce. Okay, so close. It's not gonna be as thrilling seeing Bruce get it as it is seeing Hans get it, because the shark is not really an agent. So there is no murder in this movie. I hate to tell you, Erin. There's no murderer, and there's no murderer. And we can't enjoy seeing the shark get it at the end that much. Except for the spectacle of the explosion and the fact that Brody is gonna not get eaten, I don't think it matters. 34:24 Erin: No verdure, no murder, no 34:27 Wes: perfect crime about the victims. What they're doing in the film is to represent our own vulnerability to this type of thing. I think play is always still very important. The play is going skinny dipping and then sexual play, and then the play of children. Because play implicates the release of these impulses. Right. It implicates loosening up. And then the danger is that the impulses will be too much. Or the danger is that in being less defended, we open ourselves up to outside predation and these ecstatic moments where we're not on guard. So it happens, obviously. So I think it's important that we go. I think it's great that the movie starts with, like, this typical horror trope of teenagers, but then we move on to children. The theme, you know, we're set up with Charlie getting his hand cut with the theme of child safety. And then the child gets killed. And then it's the scout master. He gets killed trying to save the kids and Michael. 35:23 Erin: Oh, right, right. 35:24 Wes: Yeah. And then who's next? Well, Gardner gets killed off screen. Right. And that was actually a second thought that. That. Yeah. That made me jump. 35:35 Erin: Yeah. That is. 35:36 Wes: That's the only point in the movie where I jumped. And Spielberg shot that scene with his own money after the fact in a pool. 35:44 Erin: That was in the tank. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 35:47 Wes: I think that shot. Was that in the tank or was it actually. So was it in a studio tank or. It might have been in someone's pool. 35:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah, someone's pool. 35:56 Wes: The. Just the part where the head is coming out. 35:58 Erin: Yeah, right. 35:59 Wes: Might have been redone in a. In someone's private pool. But anyway, that, to me, was the scariest part of the film. Gardner, by the way, is the one that they based Quint. 36:08 Erin: Quint off of. 36:09 Wes: Off of. Yeah. Yeah. So. But. Yeah, so I think the victims. I guess the victims do get progressively less innocent after the child. But did you feel a pang at all when Quint got it in the end and. 36:22 Erin: Oh, sure, yeah. There isn't even any. As much time as we've spent with him and hearing his story. There's also the. When he destroys the radio, you know, and he. I mean, we're introduced to him with nails on a chalkboard. I mean, we're not designed to even. To really love him. 36:42 Wes: Oh, yeah. 36:43 Erin: That's. 36:43 Wes: As a characteristic moment of the film. 36:45 Erin: Yeah. Tell me about it. You know, it makes me. You know, he's much like the shark he's heard first on the soundtrack before. He's seen. 36:54 Wes: All right, we haven't. Yeah. That's another thing we have to talk about is the music. But. 36:57 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, parts of the music were funny to me. You know, they're so like the adventure music at the end. 37:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a very. Music. While they're chasing the shark. It's like. 37:10 Erin: Yeah. 37:11 Wes: You know, it's John Williams off to. 37:14 Erin: Yeah, 37:17 Wes: look, we're having fun chasing the shark. Yeah, exactly. 37:20 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There's so much E.T. in there. 37:25 Wes: Right. I think it's almost all in the same mode. Is it the Lydian or something? All these movies are on the. What is the Lydian mode on? Is that the seventh? 37:38 Erin: Back to theory. 37:40 Wes: I don't know if that's right, if it's Lydian or another mode. But it gives it a very. This airy feel. It's very common in film music, but it just gives it. You know, it's there in Star wars, so this airy, kind of light but adventure y feeling. Yeah. And it seems a little. Seems a little out of place. I had the same. Exact same reaction, but. But the. The main theme music is just. Who knew? It's like a Spinal Tap moment. Just two notes right next to each other on the keyboard. Two notes. 38:16 Erin: It's as simple as that. Yeah. 38:19 Wes: What do you call this music? Jaws. 38:27 Erin: Oh, my gosh. It's like a heartbeat, too. So you have that. 38:31 Wes: So you get a chromatic ascent when 38:34 Erin: the shark goes away. That's when it Goes da da da da da. No, 38:40 Wes: there you go. 38:42 Erin: The Doppler shark. 38:46 Wes: So the chromatic element gives it that sinister quality. Sounds like a heartbeat. It sounds like, I don't know, it's very. It goes well with something that's hidden and unseen somehow. The drive element of that, just the two note. It's like an engine with two, two strokes or something. 39:03 Erin: And then that explosion. Yeah. And the. Very much he must have been influenced by the rite of spring. 39:11 Wes: Yeah. And then the crescendo and you know, the quickening and the crescendo as it, as the shark attacks. And then it sounds a little psycho like her, doesn't it? It's like donut, donut. I don't know how it crescendos, but. I'm sure listeners will appreciate this attempt to reproduce. 39:35 Erin: Yeah, psycho sort of same concept but on the opposite end of the scale. But yeah. And it's sort of like singular. Very few notes. Well, you know, another big victim of this film, I'm sorry to say is the film industry itself. I was thinking about how much, how much this film has to answer for and how much, how much maybe the, the death of Quint and the triumph of Brody and Hooper is like, you know, the death of. The death of the small budget, you know, the, the, the little tiny film business and the birth of the film industrial complex. I mean, you know, of course there was the studio system and that's, that's the film industrial complex. But yeah, the birth of the, the summer blockbuster and the. I think like Star wars gets a lot of credit blame for that. But of course this predates that by two years and, and there was so much marketing and tie ins and maybe not little action figures, you know, so associated with Star wars, but lunch boxes, T shirts. That was one of the things that really stood out to me from the. The Jaws at 50 documentary was just like how much merchandise you could buy in 1975 for the fab is surprised. You know, it's something I associate with coming like in the 80s post Star wars merchandise. It's a great film and I think Spielberg is, you know, maybe there's an argument that he's the greatest American director. And so it's kind of a curious thing that the result of this early film of his is that small budget or films that are more say on the artistic end of the scale are less likely to be made. And we have like, you know, Marvel movies are downstream effect of Jaws. There's a direct line there. 41:25 Wes: Well, apparently they, you know, the movies didn't get wide releases initially and they got a narrow, narrower release and fewer theaters. And then there was some give a chance to build word of mouth and you could do higher quality, less blockbuster y pictures. With Jaws, the marketing plan was to do a wide release after like a national coordinated media campaign. And it worked. Worked very well. So it became a highest grossing movie in history up to that point. And unfortunately, yeah, it's a model that is now chased. 42:00 Erin: Yeah. And the previous model, you know, I think was designed to give a good movie a chance to build, you know. Yeah. So would help under the radar films that didn't have these big marketing budgets find an audience. Whereas now it seems very much about this. It's. It's just become more and more a business and less and less. You know, this has always been the problem with movies as an art form, but I think it became more about business and more about trying to predict beforehand what would sell and then cramming that down people's throats and not. And not funding the little movies at all. You know, Know, until we have like now this, just A24, I guess, and that's. And then everything. All the big budget stuff. Yeah. So I don't know, as someone who's. Who's more, more, more jaded about films than I've ever been, who, you know, I kind of. I think film is over. 42:58 Wes: Well, I don't think you've seen the new, the new Superman then. 43:01 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah, yeah. I think it's. I think it's basically over. And I think a lot of people will have in the past few months have tried to argue with me and give like individual case studies and I think all of these things are death row, you know, death row films. It's over. What can we trace it back to? A lot of things we could trace it back to, you know, the death of the studio contract with the Olivia de Havilland lawsuit in 1947. You get. You know, I've found a lot of origin points in the past, but one of them is Jaws. One of them could. But, you know, that's a, that's a case that could be made. Not to end on a totally pessimistic note, but that's. 43:38 Wes: Yeah, no, I get it. 43:39 Erin: It's one of the things that makes me ambivalent about the film despite its real craft and what, what's so great about it. 43:48 Wes: Yeah, okay. I'm going to just end with one little correction on the music. It's Phrygian. Yeah. It's not, it's not. Lydia And Lydian is on the 4th, not the 7th. So like C majors. F. Lydian, C, D, E, F. Right. So the same scale, just different stopping point. But the Jaws is in B minor. The two notes are E and F, so it looks like 4 or 5. But anyway, thank you. This was fun. 44:18 Erin: Yeah, thank you. 44:19 Wes: You did enjoy it. You did enjoy the movie. Sounds like. 44:21 Erin: Oh, I did. Had a great time. Yeah, it was okay. And I successfully took a shower after without calling for help. Don't laugh at me. 44:33 Wes: I don't think he can come out of the spigots. 44:36 Erin: Comes through the wall in my imagination. Okay. And it's when my eyes are closed because I'm rinsing the shampoo out of my hair. 44:42 Wes: Candyman. 44:43 Erin: And anything can happen when you. Exactly, exactly. SNL taught us an important lesson. The threat is all around us. Of course you know the name. The name of the boat is my actual greatest fear. Which I will not say. 44:59 Wes: Orcas. Sorry. 45:02 Erin: Now that. 45:02 Wes: More afraid of. 45:03 Erin: Now that I'm scared of. Yeah, that's like really? I don't even want to. 45:06 Wes: They don't care about you. They just want a good seal. 45:08 Erin: Are you kidding me? They. So they. That's the scariest. That's the scariest animal ever. I. I just think. 45:19 Wes: Don't work. Don't work. 45:21 Erin: Scarier than a shark. A shark in a frickin mask. Okay. That's what's scary. 45:26 Wes: Pretending to be a mammal. 45:28 Erin: Yeah. And whose eyes on the mask aren't even its real eyes. 45:32 Wes: All right, let's. That's true. That's a really good point, actually. That is scary. What's the theme music for orca? 45:39 Erin: Oh, please. No. They are shooting up my spine. Goosebumps. 45:45 Wes: Okay. 45:46 Erin: I'm such a wimp. Wes. You don't even know. I have. Okay, so it's. So it's that those things. And yes, like kind of sharks. But mostly because. Okay. And sharks are scary because of the jaws and because they're really ugly and really prehistoric and all that. But I have this phobia that I didn't know was a phobia because I'm also afraid of like, you're gonna. This is so embarrassing. I'm also afraid of like the movie Titanic because. Because it turns out. Okay. Because it turns out that I'm afraid of. 46:18 Wes: New drawing. 46:20 Erin: Yes. That. Doors. Floating doors. No, I'm afraid of big things. Like I have. What is it called? Megalo. Megalomania. No, you know, Megalophobia. Yeah, something like that. 46:35 Wes: Is that a thing? 46:36 Erin: Yes. 46:37 Wes: And you're Afraid of the sublime. Well, the sublime is meant to be scary, but not scary at the same time. The not. You're missing the not scary part of the sublime. 46:47 Erin: Well, like big vistas, that's different, but like a bit like a huge thing that dwarfs you physically, you know? So that is like. I went swimming with. Did I ever tell you this? I went swimming with beluga whales and. 46:59 Wes: Oh, wow, that's. 47:00 Erin: I love beluga whales. And I think they look so sweet and great. You know, they're adorable, and they're just wonderful creatures. And the. But I started freaking out, even though I wasn't. And I was like, why am I freaking out? And anyway, I finally got the. It's just. They're huge. When you're near them, they're really, really big. And eventually I calmed down. But, yeah, it's the. It's the size thing. Feeling dwarfed by something and that even with an inanimate object. And also, like, being in the water, too, is like, you know, like big things in the water, so they're sort of like. The size is kind of obscured or even like, maybe doubled, depending on the reflection. But anyway. This is pathetic. We should. I might want to cut this out. I really shouldn't be admitting this stuff publicly, but, you know, you probably will 47:52 Wes: cut it out, even though I don't think you should. 47:54 Erin: But anyway. 47:56 Wes: All right, so what's the theme song for Orcas? It's not. It's. Is that it? Did you just do it? 48:06 Erin: Yeah. 48:07 Wes: No. 48:09 Erin: No, thank you. That's. 48:13 Wes: It's just silence. 48:14 Erin: So. The scariest music of all. 48:19 Wes: Right. Any last words? 48:20 Erin: No. Next time, we'll do the prequel to Jaws, an Enemy of the People. That's what happened to the last mayor, right? 48:31 Wes: All right, thank you. 48:32 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

We’re never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community, despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water, and the shark that inhabits it, have a fateful character that seems to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the “exact kind of splashing” human beings produce when at play in the water, and Martin himself seems to be distinctively lacking in the capacity for relaxing and letting go. What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without being consumed by them? Wes & Erin discuss Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 classic “Jaws.” Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” “There Will Be Blood,” “As You Like It,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:31 Wes: We never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water and the shark that inhabits it have a fateful character that seemed to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the exact kind of splashing human beings produce when at play in the water. And Martin himself seems to be distinctively lacking in the capacity for relaxing and letting go. What is it about play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships and communal strivings without being consumed by them? Today we discuss Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic, Jaws. This is Wes Alwan. 1:24 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:25 Wes: This is. And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I thought I'd ask you a question which may sound like it's not really to the point, but it's something that was on my mind from the beginning of the film, which is, what is Martin Brody doing in Amity in light of his. If you had to speculate, what is it that brought them there from New York City, from the big city? 1:51 Erin: That's a really good question because he talks about the fact that there's such a low crime rate in the town that it seems this town really isn't in need of a cop. And one wonders, yeah. What he does expect to do there and why. Why does this shark need a cop to kill it? I don't. I'm not really sure what. That's. 2:09 Wes: Suicide by cop. That's a new angle. Yeah. When he's, when he's walking out to go to work, she says, you know, be safe or something like that. And he's like, in this town, as in, there's no crime. And then we find out, right, he's just beset with all these petty complaints. And he is the person who's there to resolve all these minor grievances and nuisances, vandalism, the kids are karate chopping the white picket fences or people parking in the wrong place or something like that. We can imagine his job in New York was a lot more exciting. 2:42 Erin: Yeah, I found a quote from his conversation with Hooper, he says the crime rate in New York will kill you. There's so many problems, you never feel like you're accomplishing anything. Violence, ripoffs, muggings. The kids can't leave the house, you gotta walk them to school. But it Amity, one man can make a difference. In 25 years, there's never been a shooting or a murder in this town. 3:02 Wes: Wow, I didn't remember that. 3:03 Erin: It's strange. One man can make a difference in terms of. How do you make a difference when there's no crime at all? I know, yeah. What's he saving the town from? The shark, I guess. So they have to import their crime. 3:17 Wes: Right. And it's, you know, arguably it's imported from his imagination or something. It's like he, he willed it into being or something, you know. You know, given his fears, including fear of the water, Hooper at one point says, well, it doesn't make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island either. And Martin. Yeah, I'm sure you're already nodding. It's only an island if you look at it from the water. One of the great funny lines in this film. 3:43 Erin: Yeah, that's the ultimate fenced in property. Yeah, an island. And that seems to be his children are his motivation. It seems to move away from New York and get them away from crime and then they're sort of his investment in the shark. So this is his picket fence. 4:02 Wes: Right. I think we can definitely speculate that the children are part of it. Right. So the first scene in the movie involves the young woman being killed by the shark. By the way, I'm sorry for lying to you. This is a lot gorier this movie than I said it was. It's been so long since I've seen it. This time was like seeing it the first time. But as usual, every time I watched one of these scenes, like shaking my head, seeing it through you, through your eyes. 4:29 Erin: No, I really enjoyed it. I haven't seen all of the film. I will say that the scene when Quint gets murdered by the shark, I had never seen. So I don't think they showed that in its entirety. They must not have. Right. If I saw it on TV, then I never saw that scene before. I thought it was kind of awesome. I don't know. 4:48 Wes: It's cool. Wow, cool. 4:51 Erin: It helps that the shark is so fake looking. 4:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's true. 4:56 Erin: That's. 4:56 Wes: Yeah. But I was gonna say. So after that scene, we start with a very typical Spielbergian. Is that a Word type of beginning, which is a kind of vignette of family life. And it's imperfect in some way or another. Sometimes it's just imperfect in the usual way that families are imperfect. It's chaotic, but it's still very loving. And that's what you have here. And that's kind of a very similar beginning. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance, or in ET Right. Children of Divorce, you get a really kind of touching picture of family life. And maybe family life already had some sort of loss. So in this case, it does seem pretty idyllic, except that we get the smallest hints of conflict, right? So when he wakes up, the first thing that he says to his wife Ellen, or he's looking out the window and he says, it's a beautiful day. Instead of saying, oh, it's a beautiful day, he says, how come the sun didn't used to shine in here? It's almost like a complaint. And that's her opportunity to say, we bought the house in the fall. This is summer. So it's a great little way to deliver backstory. As a technical matter, we learn that they're new to the community. Later on, we learn that they'll never really be part of the community. Right? You have to be born on the island to be an islander. And that seems like that's Ellen's aspiration, right. She's asked, when will we be islanders? She gets that reply. In this first scene. It doesn't seem like it's much really his aspiration to be there. But you had mentioned the kids, and I thought this is. Yeah, this seems to be an important piece of the puzzle because in the Michael Cuts his hand, right? And then Ellen is very casually washing it off and telling him to go get a band aid, right? She doesn't put the band aid on for him. In the 70s, you got your own band aid. Just like you got to go play in the ocean without anyone watching you or, you know, the five year old on the swing, Right. I think one of the most horrifying things to a contemporary audience is probably like, the lack of child supervision. 7:03 Erin: I know. 7:03 Wes: And that's like one of the first things they ask when Ellen's like, see the K, right? The kids are already outside. They're asleep. And he's like, they must be in the backyard. So going back to the safety of the kids, right? There's this direct parallel between the young woman getting eaten by the shark and why? Because of typical horror movie trope, because of sexuality, right. There were adolescents at play and then she's running off to skinny dip with this guy. And then, of course, gets punished for it. But in the case of the children, it's a child at play, right? Child at play hurts himself. Play can be dangerous, but it's minor. And he's going to get patched up and he's going to go right back out to the ocean. And that's happening in the background while Brody is taking a call about this missing woman. So we immediately, you know, we're alerted to the idea that the safety of the children is something that's at stake here. And it's going to become more and more pressing. Right. It's why, in the end, Brody is going to have to take action when, I mean, it's part of it when, you know, Michael ends up in the hospital. 8:04 Erin: Right, yeah. That seems crucial because Quint and Hooper don't have stakes the way that Brody has stakes. So Brody is, you know, the fact of his whole family being relocated to the island gives him more of, I don't know, more of a sense of belonging in a way even than Quint, who is sort of so islander that he's, you know, Quint is this caricature of an islander who seems to have ingested all of the island's quirks and the things about it which make it a community with its own rules. A sort of exclusive place in a sort of lower middle class kind of way, but still a place where one has to break in. Quint's sort of so broken in that he's out. He's like a shoe worn through or something. 8:56 Wes: Good old Robert Shaw. He is almost worn through at that point. Right. He has a couple of years to live. 9:01 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 9:02 Wes: A couple more years of hard living to do. 9:05 Erin: Right. I know. I was thinking, like all the people in this movie I associate with other movies, like Roy Scheider. I associate with all that jazz, frankly. And that's my background talking. And Robert Shaw. I'm like, Henry, King Henry viii. Yeah, I'm like that. This is what would happen to Henry VIII if he was not a kid. 9:27 Wes: He's amazing in that. Yeah. Talk about a force of nature. I mean, he should have played the shark. 9:31 Erin: Well, he is the. I mean, yeah, they're all, all three of them is the shark. Right. Like, there's a reading where. Where each of the main trio is the shark. Roy Scheider looks like the shark in a bunch of shots. Did you notice that he has the, like the black eyes? 9:45 Wes: I never thought of that. Yeah, he is, you know, But I. I thought he is quite passive compared to Hooper and Quint, though he's often on the sideline. I mean, he. You know, the. He doesn't really come into his own until the shark is blowing up at the very end and then he paddles back. 10:01 Erin: Yeah, he doesn't speak very much. 10:03 Wes: That doesn't speak very much. And it doesn't shark, like, immediately stand up to the council people and the mayor. Right. Eventually he does. You know, he's forced to. Right. And let me hire Quint. Reluctantly goes out on the boat, is not happy about doing the chumming, is kind of getting ordered around. Hooper is making much more of a resistance to putting up much more of a fight with Quint in the movie and outside of the movie, him and. 10:29 Erin: Yeah, that's right. 10:31 Wes: He and Robert Shaw are fighting, which is great. I love that backstory where they just hated each other, sort of. 10:37 Erin: Yeah, sort of loved each other. Sort of hated each other. But, yeah, I just. I love this idea of, like, Dreyfuss just never shutting up, just constantly talking and getting on Shaw's nerves. 10:47 Wes: Yeah. 10:48 Erin: It's a totally different dynamic. But it reminds me of in Star wars when Alec Guinness paid Mark Hamill $20 to go away. 10:58 Wes: Here's your sword. Here's $20. Get out. But yeah, so just getting back to the. Because this is on. I mean, we're kind of. Yeah. We've worked our way back to the character Brody. What I think of as his passivity. He seems kind of depressed to me through most of the movie. And this whole first line is kind of part and parcel complaining. The sun is only just showing up. And we even get a hint of the idea that they'll never be part of the community. In this very scene, when he says, the kids must be in the backyard, and she says, an Amity. You say yard. And then he fakes a Boston or New England accent and then. And says, how's that? And she says, like, you're from New York, so there will always be New Yorkers, no matter what. They're never going to fully belong there. So I wanted just to continue a little bit the speculation about what might have brought them there. Right. Because I think in a contemporary Hollywood movie, I don't think they would be able to resist giving us more of this backstory because they would want to heighten the conflict. Right. Is there a conflict between the couple in the original script? Right. She sleeps with Hooper, and that's the way it is in the novel, which would have been disastrous for this movie. And I'm glad Spielberg got rid of that. Like this. 12:10 Erin: Yeah. Who would sleep with Richard Dreyfuss when you're married to Roy Scheider? It doesn't make any sense. 12:15 Wes: Well, in the novel, he's this like six foot two, blonde, buff guy. In the novel, you know, who also just happens to be a scientist. 12:24 Erin: Gotcha. 12:26 Wes: Yeah, no, that would not have worked either. But the contrast between Hooper and Brody and Quint is very, very important. But, you know, you can speculate, right? It could be, hey, this is too much for the kids. New York is unsafe. Let's go to a nice, safe little beach town. It could be being a big city cop is too stressful. It could be. You know, in some movies it would be, I shot that kid in the ass. Is that. What. Is that the Blazing Saddles thing? I shot someone. I had something traumatic in my police job. 13:01 Erin: Right. Well, something did. Something did happen. We know he has. He has scars, too. I mean, we all have scars, but those three have. Have visible ones. 13:11 Wes: This doesn't sound like his choice. It sounds more like what Ellen wanted. So you can imagine, she persuaded him to do this. She thinks being like this is like going, you know, let's go to the Hamptons. Let's do it permanently. 13:24 Erin: I don't know. I don't know. You know, I think in the quote that I read when he's talking to Hooper, he's given up. He's given up on New York. You know, it seems. It seems like a personal decision to have left because he felt it was futile to stay. So he traded one island for another. He's looking for a safe community for his kids. And it is interesting that he's. I think you're right that he's depressed. I never thought of that before. He's also. He's very, you know, he's so tan, which is kind of funny because that implies being out getting sun. Right? And instead he seems like this dark cloud. Like, you know, someone calls the shark the cloud over the seaside community. But he kind of seems like this dark cloud in the middle of this sunshiny beach environment. 14:13 Wes: Sits around in lawn chairs waiting for dolly. Zooms. 14:16 Erin: Exactly. 14:17 Wes: Waiting. 14:18 Erin: What a great shot, right? 14:19 Wes: It's great. Such a great shot. Yeah, yeah. Waiting for something bad to happen. But. 14:24 Erin: Yeah, right. He's so dark, you know, and compared to. What's her name? Lorraine Gray, is it? Or Gary something. Lorraine Gray. Gary, you know, who's so blonde. Like, he seems even darker, you know, like the whole, you know, that kind of like whitewashed look of the town, maybe in more ways than one. It's so bright and he's like this dark spot. 14:48 Wes: Yeah. This could be the town also. To which the black sheriff shows up. That would be a different story. 14:52 Erin: Right, right. 14:54 Wes: The only black person. Speaking of Blazing Saddles, again, I didn't think I would be making so many Blazing Saddles references. 15:04 Erin: Well, you know, the thing I kept thinking of was Alien over and over again. And a little bit of Godzilla, which we could get into, but not that I've seen a full Godzilla film, but Alien is definitely. I know that they pitched Alien as Jaws in space. 15:16 Wes: Right, right. Well, every movie after that became Jaws in something. 15:20 Erin: Jaws in something. Right, right. Yeah. No, but I think that, you know, the Hoopers, you know, another clever way that they work in explication about the shark is the device of Hooper being the expert. And the way that he describes the shark is a perfect. You know, it's like a miracle of evolution or something. It's almost exactly what they say about the eating machine. Eating machine, right. 15:42 Wes: Which just made me think, well, that's just my average Tuesday evening. 15:47 Erin: Boy, me too. 15:50 Wes: He's a mindless eating machine. 15:52 Erin: Mindless eating machine. Yep. 15:53 Wes: Yep. 15:54 Erin: I am Lady Pac Man. Yeah. That it swims, eats, and makes little sharks. That's, I think, like it's almost word for word what they say about the alien, what Ian Holm's character says about the alien. 16:09 Wes: Oh, interesting. 16:10 Erin: Another cyborg, Richard Dreyfuss is anything but. I'm just kidding. 16:15 Wes: Right. 16:16 Erin: Yeah. 16:16 Wes: There's not really much marital conflict. You know, like this small hint of it. Like maybe she wanted to come and he didn't. But as you said, there's. There's evidence as well, but for whatever. Whatever the case, they're in a water community and he doesn't like the water. Other hints, you know, like she says, let's get drunk and fool around. And his response to me seemed pretty tepid. And it's in line in general with his reserve. Right. So he's, you know, he's not just depressive, but a psychoanalyst would call him obsessional and kind of in control and quite reserved, which is to say, you know, he has trouble letting go and he has trouble playing. You know, you could see the whole water thing as trouble with play. Right. Water is the place where we play. This made me think of hanging rock again, too. Like the kind of danger we put ourselves in to enjoy ourselves, to be in recreation. And the way that can go wrong. Right. If you get drunk and go skinny dipping, maybe you'll just Drown, Drowned. Maybe you'll just drown, not get attacked by a shark. Or if you're a child going into the water, obviously that's dangerous. I mean, I felt just a little concerned that the kid's going out to the ocean by himself. You know, that's just my contemporary sensibility. I'm like that 11 year old is running off to the ocean by himself. I wouldn't let a kid do that. Even though when I was 6, I was completely unsupervised 24 hours a day. I walked to school a mile away by myself, did everything by myself. But not in this day and age. I think some of this is about play and the dangers of play and more broadly, the dangers of letting go and giving in to one's impulses. Obviously, if you think of him as obsessional, he's to some extent scared of his impulses and what they can do to others. And I'm not gonna beat this over the head so that the shark becomes representative of that, right? Becomes representative of his own impulses towards others. It's like he's, when he, that dolly take, right, he's watching. It's not just, oh, the thing that I feared is happening now or even the thing that I expected because there's some element of expectation, right. But the thing that I'm somehow causing this, my fear is causing this, or maybe I even wanted this to happen at some level. That's part of the, I think the horror of it, you know, and the island speaks to that insularity. Like he's an island and he's hemmed in by the ocean as a chaotic world of impulse, that he doesn't want to go there. 18:48 Erin: Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I was thinking of as I was watching is what a weird thing going to the beach is. I mean, this is the, you know, there's, there's play which has its dangers. But if you say fall off a, you know, if you fall off the monkey bars, that's not such a terrible thing. Fixable, right. You know, the, the beach is such a strange. I mean, I, I grew up going to the beach. I love going to the beach. It's, it's perfect for my, my weird obsessional thing which is, you know, you get, you lie out and you, you know, so much of the beach is about not going in the water, right? And in fact, you know, I think even if there was a shark in the water, they could just have like, they could just rope it off. I have like all these solutions for how they could have fixed this without killing the shark. You know, like you could still go 19:37 Wes: sunbathing and then you put a sign up. You just go, not allowed. 19:40 Erin: Yeah, no, you just go in up to your. Up to your knees or something and that's it. And then come out. But no, but, like, you know, it's so. It's so strange. It's like you're. Anytime you go to the beach, it's like you're playing at the edge of a. Of a canyon. And it's a strange mix of the elemental because so much of it is about not going in the water. Right. It's about baking in the sun, it's about being out in the air, and then it's about going in the water. It's about the contrast sort of, you know, which is why I like it. So then you go in the water and then you get all freezing cold and wrinkled and pruned, and then you go out and you dry off and you, you know, the air, the hot air dries you and then you get too hot, so you go back in the water. So it's like, you know, there's like perfect ecosystem of, like, contrast stimulations. It's a bizarre thing to do, I think, for that reason which, you know, come to think of it like these, these contrasts, it's like it's as much about the air and about not being in the water as it is about being in the water. And then you have this idea of this confrontation with what could be lurking in there. The shark is as much a member of this community as any of the islanders, if not more so. Right. So as one of the interesting things about the beach is that you are on the edge of an extremely dangerous natural force. All kinds of things could be in the water. And so, you know, that's why the shark could be Brody, because it's sort of foreign to the island, but it also could be Quint because it's a prehistoric resident of the island that has this kind of ancestral belonging, you know, predates whoever considers themselves an islander by hundreds of millions of years. 21:26 Wes: Quint could have pulled off the shark more realistically than the animatronic. 21:31 Erin: I think so, too. 21:33 Wes: But, yeah, you know, I think this is really spot on. Yeah. My experience of the beach is that there's a certain amount of healthy fear. I'm not particularly fearful. I did, I don't want to call it a near drowning experience. My sister and I definitely got into water that was too deep and we were, you know, as young kids and we were getting Pulled under. And then an adult came and pulled us out. Not. Not our parents or family, of course. That was a scary experience. I. You know, I feel that routinely around nieces and nephews. I feel if we're in a pool situation or water situation, my eye. You know, my eyes are always on the kids. And it reminds me, you know, someone was talking to me recently about the experience of taking a child into the ocean and their level of ecstasy, right, at being in the water if they're a young child. And it's still very new to them, but also mixed with some fear, right, Getting pulled out, pull me back. And the role of the parent in managing that. So it. And it is, again, it does make me think of this world of impulse where parents are also helping children manage those impulses. Right? So you have to have them. You can't simply get rid of them. Although Brody is on his way to doing that to the extent that he's reserved. So you allow for it. You allow for the ecstatic moment and being there in the ocean and enjoying one's impulses, but you also pull them back into shore a little bit, or you manage that experience for them. If you do that successfully, then there is no shark. It's not successful if you just push it all down and avoid the water. That's when the shark. That's when the shark happens. Comes back to bite you, in other words. 23:22 Erin: That's right. Well, you know, the shark is so perfect because I was thinking so much about. I became obsessed with synecdoches watching this film. Did you. Did you feel the same way? Because the title is a synecdoche. And then I was thinking about all the synecdoche in the film, partially because of the way that the film deals in that Hitchcockian suspense kind of grammar as a way of, like, avoiding seeing the shark. So it has to be suggested, and partially because I think, like, this is kind of how horror works, that you just see something that's suggestive of the larger threat. But, you know, I was thinking about the shark as a synecdoche for all of the potential terror of, say, the ocean or even nature. You know, we have the title of the film and the name of the shark, if you want to call it Jaws, as being, you know, so it's representative of that. The shark itself is really a terror of the mouth, though there's also the fin, which is a sort of symbol or synecdoche for the whole shark, which the kids use when they have that, like, little fake fin in the water. And that in itself, I think, kind of, it sort of repeats the curve of, like, the tooth. So the fin to me is very toothy as well. Like, we get the single tooth that Hooper finds. You know, the island could, you know, is sort of synecdoche for an entire, you know, culture. I don't know, like little, Little, little bites of things were. Were occurring to me all over the place. Like the, the mayor's sport jacket that has the anchors on it, the barrels standing in for the. That's not a synecdoche, but, but, but it's a metonym. You know, the barrels standing in for the shark. The images of the bites taken out of the shark victims that, that Brody looks at, which is a sort of like, you know, the photo negative of the shark of its bite, of its mouth. I don't know. All of these things which are replacements or stand ins for. For. For something else. So the shark, I mean, I think it's so polysemous in terms of what we can say it represents, but I think that's because it seems to represent the entire thread of the unknown. So it's so richly symbolic in terms of what is attached to it or what we might attach to it. 25:43 Wes: Yeah, the unknown, including, as I was saying, drive or driven side of our own nature or the instinctual side. So impulse and. And Right. In a way, a shark just looks like drive incarnate. I mean, that's part of the power of. Let's see how Hooper puts it. You know, the thing about a shark, he's got these. Well, is this Hooper speaking? This might be Quint. Yeah, this is Quint. Think about a shark. He's got these. Got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at you, it doesn't seem to be living until he bites you and those black eyes roll over white. Or Hooper's. Again, description of it as a form of mindlessness. And this is the thing that's always threatening to take us over. Right. We manage it with our minds and it becomes represented to our minds. But the impulses themselves are mysterious. They're underneath and they come up, they rise up. And you see a fin at first, and then the next thing you know, you're eating a whole Papa John's pizza. You have no idea where that came from. Something like that. So that's one aspect, but as you point out. Yeah, it's much broader in the sense that anything in the domain of the unknown, or as a, you know, we might say the real the world as it is in its unrepresented state, which we can't really know until it's represented. Until it reaches us and bites us, so to speak. But is there nonetheless. But I was thinking, yeah, the shark is a really good representation of drive in general. The. The fact that it has to keep moving or it dies, as Hooper says. It's just, you know, eating and reproducing. What else is it doing? It does three things. 27:37 Erin: Eats, swims and makes little sharks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is also a special shark. This is a, you know, we. We get. 27:46 Wes: Because he's. He's a big one. 27:48 Erin: Because he's big and because he's smart. 27:51 Wes: Or she. 27:52 Erin: Or she. Yeah, let's not watch it, Wes. Yeah, no, the. The tiger shark that they catch, that's your garden variety monster, you know, but the. The. The regular old man eater, they're actually 28:06 Wes: way more aggressive, by the way. So let me do the nerdy thing. And the kid. As a kid, I was into sharks. Tiger sharks are responsible for more attacks on human beings and. And cars are way more aggressive in general than white sharks, if I remember correctly. It could be, but. Yeah, but. Yeah, that's. But the. The tiger shark. The what. Meant to represent something ordinary. I love that response. Because all those. All those minor actors, right. They're just all locals on Martha's Vineyard. 28:37 Erin: Yeah. So great. 28:38 Wes: That's great. 28:39 Erin: I gotta say that the woman who plays. 28:42 Wes: Yes. 28:42 Erin: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. 28:44 Wes: I know. The councilwoman who says, you know, I don't find that funny. 28:47 Erin: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, I love her, actually. She's amazing. She reminds me of my grandmother. 28:53 Wes: Oh, really? 28:54 Erin: She's so great. Yeah. Because she's like. So. She's like a super, super dark tan. And the dark. It's very. 29:00 Wes: Yeah. 29:00 Erin: And she has that kind of like, sardonic voice. No, I was thinking of the mother of the boy who's killed in the black veil. She's great. She just has a great look to her that looks like she was someone who came out of a casting session, not a local. 29:17 Wes: Isn't it just. It makes it seem like acting really isn't that hard. They all might as well have been professionals. 29:29 Erin: There's a bell curve, I think. There's really good when you're an amateur and then really, really terrible when you're. When you're actually trying. But you're not that great. 29:40 Wes: Right, right. If they ever start to take it seriously, then they'd go through a phase where. 29:44 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. 29:46 Wes: And then maybe for a long time and maybe Forever. 29:48 Erin: Yes, exactly. 29:48 Wes: Maybe they would eventually come back out. 29:51 Erin: Yeah. 29:51 Wes: The other side. 29:52 Erin: And also the older couple on the beach who the mayor convinces to go in the water. That guy, fabulous actor. That local guy, you know, I'm talking about when he. 30:03 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking the. I was thinking the same thing. 30:05 Erin: Yeah. So many fabulous individual performances, but. So the tiger shark seems like this, the normal, mindless animal. But one of the problems with Jaws, with Bruce, whatever we want to call him, is, is the sort of theory of mind about him or. Or the implication that this is a shark with a. With a vendetta, with a. Eventually he's going to follow them all the way to the Bahamas. Right in like Jaws 4 or something. 30:35 Wes: Oh, really? 30:36 Erin: Okay. One of those. 30:37 Wes: This is Moby Dick meets People. 30:41 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. 30:42 Wes: Which I think is not in this case. I think the movie kind of falters here. The shark doesn't make a good vendetta creature. I think maybe a whale could. But am I wrong about that? I don't. I don't find the second half of the movie as gripping as the first, even though I know for a lot of people it's the opposite. I don't find the chase same. Yeah, I think it breaks down a little bit, in all honesty, but. 31:06 Erin: Yeah, you know, this is so funny. I've. Last night I watched the Sandlot and I always forget that the last. It's almost the. It's almost the entire second half. Much like this film, it's almost the entire second half of the film is just the chase scene. When's the last time you saw the sandlot? You know, they keep hitting those baseballs into the yard of the killer dog. And then the last half of the movie really is Boy Takes a Baseball that Was Signed by Babe Ruth. He doesn't know who Babe Ruth is, so he doesn't know how. That he shouldn't be playing with this ball. They hit it over into the yard with the killer dog and then they try to get the ball back through a series of. You know, then the rest of the movie is them trying to get the ball back, basically, and like a very long chase sequence. Oh, it's fantastic. I watch it every summer. Yeah. So we were just watching that here with my family and big group of people. And the second half of the movie is so boring because it's like, oh, right. Then they're gonna try and get it with the erector set and they're gonna rig up the vacuum cleaners and all this stuff. And then the dog gets out and there's this long chase sequence. So the whole thing is just one big, long set piece of trying to defeat this animal, basically. And I was like, this is exactly like Jaws. It's the same. Exact same ratio of, you know, like, fun plot, great dialogue, lots of characters at the beginning, and then second half entirely just action sequence. All related to the same kind of basic premise. 32:37 Wes: And very dominated also by Quint, by Robert Shaw. He sort of just takes over the movie, which is great in some ways. You know, he's great. But also, it's too much. He's more of a force than the shark is. I think the shark is a little anticlimactic comparison to him especially, you know. And we start seeing the shark more in the second half, which undoes a lot of the movies. You know, what works very well in the first half of the movie is not seeing too much of the shark becomes a little pornographic a little in the second half. And the pornography is, you know, it's. It's a prosthesis, essentially. Essentially. It's not real. It's pretty damn good. I mean, you know, the. You know, especially. And then, you know, factoring in that it's 50 years old. It's amazing, you know, what. What they did with the shark and all that. But we see enough of it that, for me, there's no demonic quality. Well, maybe there's two senses of demonic and, you know, it's demonic in the sense of that mindless, driven thing, but the kind of thing that we can be possessed by. You know, our minds can be taken over by mindlessness, by instincts. But I don't think it's good. A good representative of evil. 33:43 Erin: What are we really talking about here? Evil or. Or threat. Right. Because I think there are two different things. Or. What is it about fear? 33:51 Wes: Yeah. So maybe. Maybe it's not really meant to be. Now that you say that, maybe it's not meant to be representative of evil. 33:57 Erin: Well, because. Because if it's about fear, then I think sharks are a better symbol for fear than whales. Because the fear is that we're getting eaten. The fear is that we're right. That there. No. That, like, we are prey and we are lunch. Is that. I mean, that's not my fear, per se. Like, my fear is getting, like, tortured by this thing. The way that the. You know, it's not necessarily like getting chomped down on in, like, a sudden death kind of scenario. It's the opening scene. That's. The terror is that this thing is. And that's. That's what makes this different from an ordinary shark? Because a shark wouldn't play with you like that. Like, this shark is sadistic. It's playing with this woman and dragging through the water in. In a. 34:42 Wes: In a. I used to read about shark attacks a lot as a kid. Like I said. 34:45 Erin: Okay, don't tell me. 34:46 Wes: They'll. They'll grab you and drag you down at the bottom of the ocean and. 34:50 Erin: Oh, God. Okay. 34:51 Wes: They do that whole side to side thing where they shake you around. And 34:56 Erin: I was. I was comforting myself as I was watching this, like, literally saying out loud, like, this would never happen in real life. This is just making it. Okay, all right. 35:05 Wes: No, it's terrifying. You can't. You can't see what's under there in the water. And then this is gonna ruin. End up in something's stomach all of a sudden. That's. 35:15 Erin: Yeah. 35:15 Wes: No, I find it very terr. That. Very terrifying. I get even. That and jellyfish. I don't want to get hit by a jellyfish. 35:26 Erin: Oh, yeah. Well, I've been stung so many times at this point. That's. 35:32 Wes: You're not afraid enough then? 35:34 Erin: Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not. And I have to. I have to preserve my ability to go to the beach because that's all I. That's all I have. No, I come from, you know, I come from beach family. You know, my mom was a competitive swimmer. My parents were both super, super into scuba diving, actually. And my mom wouldn't watch Jaws because she was too afraid to, like. They were serious scuba divers. They went scuba diving on their honeymoon. Like, it was a scuba diving trip on their honeymoon. 36:04 Wes: Oh, wow. 36:04 Erin: Yeah. 36:05 Wes: So have you been scuba diving? 36:07 Erin: No, no, I was afraid. I'm. I'm more afraid of the. I've been once pressurized air and getting the bends than I am of anything in the water. 36:16 Wes: Yeah, it's scary. 36:17 Erin: Yeah. So I like just free. Free swimming, snorkeling. 36:22 Wes: Yeah. But. Yeah, so we're. We're thinking about getting Eden versus the devil, maybe. Is that what we're trying to work out? Y. Yeah. Maybe it's not meant really a representative of evil. I think they try to motivate Quint's grudge. Right. By having him be on the Indianapolis, which is a cool speech that he gives. And Robert Shaw helped rewrite that speech and, you know. 36:46 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Pretty good novelist. 36:49 Wes: Yeah. Does a great, great job with it. And I don't think we get there as far as at a visceral level identifying with his grudge against Sharks. And it's not like Ahab. Right? It's not. I don't think there's much emotional impact in all of that. And a grudge, right. I think a grudge only makes sense if you bring in the idea that it represents evil in some way. 37:16 Erin: Well, I'm very moved by the. By the Indianapolis story. 37:19 Wes: Okay. 37:19 Erin: That really works for me. 37:21 Wes: No, I mean, I think it was. I mean, I think it was great, but. 37:23 Erin: Yeah, no, but I agree with you about the grudge thing. Like, I'm not sure that it does make sense as a grudge. This is. I think what makes it so interesting, symbolically, is there's. There's too much fault on Quint's side. Like, there's so much going on on a symbolic level with the story of the Indianapolis, because they're taking little boy, I think it is, to Japan. Right. So there's. There's something about, like, that kind of implication. So if the shark represents the evil in the world or something, and then we have this story about the sharks picking off the men who took a nuclear bomb to Japan, then the sharks are also kind of like payback for evil, too. Right. Like, there's something about. There's something about the culpability, you know, I'm talking on the symbolic level, you know, something about the culpability that these men have that the shark as revenge is about. It's almost about, like, guilt. 38:26 Wes: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. 38:28 Erin: And the working out of that guilt. So I think Quint has survivor's guilt, and I think that that is a big part of his relationship to sharks. Plural. Maybe not this shark in particular. I mean, this shark in particular is a business proposition for him. Like I said, this is why he's kind of like the shark. He's in the community and of the community, but also apart from it, because he doesn't have kids that are at the beach potentially going to be lunch for this particular shark. So it's about a monetary thing for him and kind of about this vendetta, but also maybe he can expiate his survivor's guilt over killing as many sharks as he can. That's, I think, a bit different from a vendetta. Is that right? 39:14 Wes: Yeah. No, I think this is good. This helps me understand it a little bit more. The way he delivers that speech is really great because it's with a smile, you know, all the way through, and you kind of get a sense of the pain of it, and then he ends it, you know, 1100 men in the water, 316 men can't come out. The sharks took the rest anyway. We delivered the bomb. Guilt over survival and guilt over the bomb, maybe. Right. Those two things. Right. We could broaden the concept of guilt to the idea of guilt over sexuality. So that's why you get stabbed, hacked in the horror picture. One minute you're teenagers having fun. Right. So a lot of slasher pics, Right. Starts out with teen sex and then ends with violence. In this case, skinny dipping or as a child, you're being careless or something like that. But yeah, any. Any of these attacks could be seen as a consequence of something one has done wrong. And then how do you atone? I guess. So if you've survived it, like Quint, what do you do? You work through conscience by attacking it back. 40:26 Erin: Right. And yet. And yet Quint is. All of those men on the Indianapolis were sort of double victims because they're also the victims of the government in terms of following orders. I mean, this is something that. This is something that I think for Spielberg will really come to the fore in Saving Private Ryan, a movie I suspect we'll do eventually. Right. But there's the. There's also this idea of like, you're just a pawn, so strikes are just picking you off. There's nothing you can do about it. You have to deliver this bomb. There's nothing you can do about it. They've decided to make it a top secret mission. Therefore your location is unknown. Right. That's. Part of it, is that they didn't even know it had been wrecked because the mission was top secret. So they couldn't get help early enough. So they were a victim of that kind of. Or they were vulnerable to a Japanese torpedo attack because of the particular way in which this mission was constructed, again, by forces outside of their control. 41:26 Wes: So the concept of helplessness looms large here. 41:29 Erin: The Indianapolis is such a fascinating cipher then, for the way to read the rest of the film. Because I think the connection of a sort of governmental authority, like doing what it needs to do to fulfill its own drive, right. Whatever its own mission is, is very much a part of, like the mayor and what the mayor is doing. And all of these things, I think are extremely. They're even more complicated by the fact that Brody himself is also, as an employee of the city and as a sort of representative of law and order, is also implic in those governmental structures as well. So it's not. It can't be neatly parsed out. I don't think I was reading a really. The one little bit of outside Reading I did on this is this really fascinating Frederick Jameson essay about Jaws. And the idea that Quint represents sort of like small business America and a certain kind of World War II, New Deal kind of individualism, you know, doing it himself, working alone. And, you know, what's the significance of the fact that in the end, he, as this Ahab figure, dies. And then you have Ishmael sort of split into Brody and Hooper, who represent law and order and science and technology, you know, so it's as if an older economy and an older way of looking at, you know, sort of like mom and Pop store is being replaced by the military industrial complex, basically. All of that to say that, you know, I don't think that what the film is saying about, like, government or America as expressed in the Indianapolis story is easily unpacked or simple or even sensical. The film isn't making an explicit statement about the larger, like, the American forces in World War II or anything like that. At least I don't think so, but. 43:23 Wes: Right. 43:24 Erin: No, but it's in there. I mean, it's in there and I think, like, the bomb is in there and the. I see the ending of the film as a recapitulation of the Indianapolis story. So only in scrambled order, deliver the 43:37 Wes: bomb to the shark. Right? Into the shark. 43:38 Erin: Yeah. I mean, like, in the. Like a straightforward reading, the shark is Japan, you know, like this, you know, because the shark both torpedoes the boat and gets blown up. That's the Japanese. Right. 43:51 Wes: Interesting. 43:53 Erin: So, I mean, I kind of mapped everything out. There's the. There are four sort of elements of the Indianapolis story. There's the delivery. So they successfully deliver the components for little boy, including uranium. So that's the delivery. Then they're torpedoed by the Japanese navy. Then they get eaten by the sharks. And then the fourth, you know, sort of unspoken part is the actual detonation of the nuclear bomb. So delivery, torpedo, shark, explosion. That's scrambled. Then in the killing of Jaws, but we have the shark torpedoes the boat, the shark eats Quint. The delivery of the bomb in the shark's mouth, the tank, and then the detonation from afar with the rifle shot, the explosion. So it's just. They map onto each other, just in a slightly shuffled order. 44:40 Wes: Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. 44:43 Erin: I thought way too hard about that this morning. I was just, like, trying to figure out. I was like, enriched uranium was this, like a tank, this air in the tank? You know, because some of those tanks have. Of compressed air, it's actually enriched Air. 44:56 Wes: Oh, interesting. 44:58 Erin: I was really galaxy braining it while I was out for a walk. So. 45:02 Wes: No, that is. Yeah, that's very interesting. So we're getting the end of part one. What should we talk about in part two? 45:09 Erin: Maybe we should go into Hooper and the class distinction too. That's between. In that conversation between Hooper and Quint. 45:17 Wes: Sounds good. patreon.com subtextpodcast or doing it right on Apple. If you do it right on Apple, then part two will just follow immediately after the end of this part. If not, you can wait until next week. 45:37 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the Nora of Act I, the charming toy of the men in her life who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband’s recent promotion is set to provide, and the Nora of Act III, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self-determination? Wes & Erin discuss continue their discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” Upcoming Episodes: Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Ibsen's play A Doll's House. We're still talking about money. We're gonna be. We're gonna be talking about money the whole time. We're talking about how Nora has a different relationship to the future, shall we say, than Torvald does in her, as demonstrated by her relationship with money. I also, you know, I want to piggyback off of that and just say that Nora is aware as well of the power that her looks give her. And she's also aware that this is a finite power. So she's also investing, if you will, in the present. She talks about the fact that she might reveal the scheme of the loan to Torvald when she's old and has lost her looks. Do you remember that part? 1:15 Wes: Mm. But that's impossible. That'll never happen. 1:18 Erin: That'll never happen. You gotta love Nora's self confidence for all of her being a beggar. Oh, here we go. It's on 122. I found it. She says, yes, perhaps one day, many years from now, when I'm no longer as pretty. You shouldn't laugh. I mean, of course, when Torvald no longer admires me as much as he does now, when he no longer finds it amusing to have me dance for him, dress up and recite things. Oh, God, that is awful. Then it might be good to have something in reserve. And she breaks off. Oh, rubbish, Rubbish. That time will never come. She's smarter too, then about the present, about necessity, things that need to be done at this moment, the sacrifices that need to be made now for the future. And also, she's smart about the Ways to get things. So she. When she recounts to Christine the moment of her husband's diagnosis, she says to Christine, good Lord, don't you understand? He wasn't even meant to know how much danger he was in. I was the one the doctors came to saying that his life was at risk, that nothing could save him except to stay in the south and only four star hotels would do now, don't you think I tried to coax him at first. I talked to him about how lovely it would be for me to travel abroad like other young wives. I cried and I begged. I said he should please remember my condition. She's pregnant at the time, right? Is that it? I guess that he must be kind to give in to my wishes. And then I suggested that he could perhaps take out a loan. But then he almost went into a fury, Christine. He said I was frivolous and that it was his duty as a husband not to give way to me and my whims and caprices, I think he called it. Well, I thought, you've got to be rescued. And so I found a way out. So she acts the part of the frivolous wife. So she's been told he's going to die unless he goes. He's not to be told that he will die. So she has to find a way to get him to go without telling him, it's for your own good, it's for your health. So she plays the part of, well, I want nice things, I want my trip abroad, I want my time, you know, I want my vacant, my fancy vacation. She puts it in those terms, I want to take my frivolous, extravagant vacation and you better pay for it. And so I think this is evidence that she is aware of things. You know, in the last part, I think I pointed briefly to some evidence that she knew all along that her opinions were different from him. And I think that she was aware of. And in instances like these where she recounts him refusing to take out a loan, she obviously had a different opinion about him, about the idea of taking out a loan. And that's demonstrated by her actions. And I think she's aware of putting on the mask of the coquette, the alluring woman, and also at times putting on the mask of the high maintenance young wife who wants what she wants. All of these things are to manipulate him to do something either for his own good or for the sake of the children. 4:18 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure if I completely agree about how aware she is of all of these things. She is making a dramatic Transformation. In the end, she's not aware of all the things that she talks about. In the end, she might be partly aware or unconsciously aware. It's a weird way to put it. Certainly the sprouts and the beginnings of awareness are there and I think they're enacted, right. They come out in the whole. The loan is not just about her loving him and wanting him to get better. It's about finding out who he is, I think. Right. It's not consciously that. And it's also about efficacy. Right. So she says at one point, right. See Christine, aren't I also capable of something? This was her big moment of individuation and efficacy. It was her way of asserting herself and being more than a doll, being more than this powerless thing in Torvald's household. But she's also aware that it puts her husband into a kind of debt, emotional debt. He doesn't like financial debt, but it also puts him into a kind of emotional debt. Just think how awkward and humiliating it would be for Torvald with his manly self esteem to know he owed me something. It would upset the entire balance of our relationship. Our beautiful happy home would no longer be what it is. And of course that's the whole point of this trajectory of events is to unsettle the balance of the relationship because the relationship is unsatisfactory. Is she aware that the relationship is unsatisfactory? Probably like most people. Yes and no. Right. You know, it's like she is and she isn't. She's in probably quite a bit of denial, but she's aware enough to get things going to the point of discovery. I don't know. Does that sound right? 6:05 Erin: Yes. No. I don't disagree with you and I don't think that these things are mutually exclusive. I mean, I think that she could be aware of the ways in which she's manipulating him up to a point. Right. And think that this is happiness. I mean, part of this idea is, or part of the idea of why she's doing the things she's doing is supposed to be out of this self sacrificial. She's trying to please him. She's trying to please him. Right. And that's a woman's job after all, isn't it? It's to be a wife, it's to be a mother, it's to not have an identity except in relation to these other people. So it's to not be an individual or a human being. It's to sure put on this little performance if that's what's going to make my husband happy, because that is the number one thing, is to make him happy and to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And she only discovers at the end of the play that she had not been happy all along performing for him. Right. So she knows she's performing for him, but she thinks that this is actually making her happy to exert herself for him in this way. She realizes at that point that she's only been cheerful, not happy on some deeper level. 7:10 Wes: Right, right. 7:11 Erin: But I think her awareness is more considerable than everything being on an unconscious level, or most things being on an unconscious level. She says to Christine, for instance, when she accuses Christine of being condescending to her, says, you're like the others. You all think I'm incapable of anything really serious. She's talking about serious work, but I think she's talking about something else there, too. She expresses, in other words, a frustration. 7:37 Wes: And this is why she basically brags about the loan. This is the serious thing that she did. She wants to counter Christine's perception. 7:42 Erin: Yes, I know what I'm doing. I have efficacy, too. I understand. You know, she understands enough to lie about the macaroons, for instance. You know, she understands enough to lie in the long term to Torvald about this loan. She knows not to tell him. 7:59 Wes: Yeah, I just don't think she fully. I don't think she understands why she took out the loan. She partly understands. Right. 8:07 Erin: Yes, I agree with you. 8:08 Wes: Right. So she understands that it gives her a sense of efficacy, but she doesn't, I would say. Right. As a psychoanalyst, the two main motivations for her in doing this are to this just the sense of efficacy that it gives her in the immediate moment and the fact that it sets in motion a chain of events which will lead to her own independence and individuation. Right. 8:31 Erin: Those are still secondary to the reason, which is he needs to go south to save his life. 8:36 Wes: Well, that's the conscious. That's the conscious motive. 8:39 Erin: Okay, I see, I see. 8:40 Wes: And that, I think, is true, but it's also only part of the equation. And in a way, the two unconscious motives I've given, I think, are more. Are stronger, in a sense, and the conscious motive just masks that. Which is not to say she doesn't love him and wanted him to get well. I think there's an apt quotation here, which is. It's a variation on the. Oh, these things are so hard to keep track of or get a hold of. She'll say later on, these kinds of transactions are so extremely difficult to keep track of. And she's talking about, she's saying to Christine that she doesn't know how much she has left to pay on the loan. But at this point, I think the play has paved the way enough that we can read the subtext of that, which is that transactions of love and honor are hard to keep track of. These are two different currencies. And Torvald in the end will say, well, no one would trade his own honor for love. Right? This is the non financial transaction that's really at issue in the play. Honor, independence, efficacy, autonomy versus love. For the sake of love. Would you trade away your independence, Torvald? No. No one would ever do that, Nora. That's what women do. That's what this is about. She sets in motion a chain of events where he is invited to appreciate that by being subjected to a situation where he has to make a decision, is he going to sacrifice his honor for the sake of love in the way that she has been forced to? She's inviting him into that position that she's experienced as a woman. Well, she's inviting him into that, into that position and inviting him to live up to his promise that he would be self sacrificing for her. And of course he can't do it. So she's right. So there's an unconscious motivation, I think, in the very beginning or before the play even begins, to expose him for the type of person he is. Some instinctual level. She knows something wrong is wrong with the relationship. I don't think she can articulate it, but she acts in such a way that it'll be articulated in the course of time. 10:56 Erin: Yeah, I love that, you know, in thinking through that, I wonder the extent to which these psychological questions, these unconscious motivations that you're pointing to are capable of coming to the fore in this play at this point, present moment, the moment of the play, only because it's been so long since Torvald's illness. In other words, the immediate, the conscious motivation is now so distant from the dramatic moment of the play. You know, we don't see Torvald as someone who was ever sick. And he has this distaste for Dr. Rank's illness, or for illness in general, I think as a result of the fact both that he did not know that he was ill. 11:37 Wes: Plot wise. What brings everything to a head is his promotion, because that's what makes Krogstad uneasy. He knows he's gonna get fired and so has to embark on his project of blackmail, which you know, will inevitably lead to the exposure of all this. And then. And then the real exposure, which is the exposure of Torvald. 11:57 Erin: Right. 11:58 Wes: For being the person, the type of person that he. That he is. 12:01 Erin: Right. 12:01 Wes: So this has all been hibernating, so to speak. It's unearthed by the promotion. So the happy promotion. Right. Which is going to bring them out of frugality and asceticism and austerity. Self denial, supposedly. And it's going to justify her extravagance. It's going to allow her to. Anyway. That, ironically, is the thing that brings it all down. 12:26 Erin: Right. She's finally going to be out of austerity. He has everything the way he likes it and hasn't been denied anything. So the austerity was being experienced only, it seems, by Nora. 12:36 Wes: Right. All of that in quotation marks. There's no. 12:38 Erin: Right, Right. 12:39 Wes: Well, to some extent, they've lived in austerity. If she's been making the presents out of paper or doing whatever it is she was, and they didn't have a proper Christmas tree the last. The previous year. But it's hard to tell, Right. Were they really that poor off or. Yeah, yeah. What's going on there? But in any case, whatever situation that they're in, she gets the brunt of it because she's on the allowance. 12:59 Erin: Right. And we're also made to understand that part of the austerity was as a result of Torvald refusing to take certain cases as a lawyer, which I think is very important. So in the previous part, you made this really great distinction between the kind of illness that Dr. Rank has and the kind of illness that Krogstad has, and that Torvald makes a distinction between these two. Torvald isn't even aware of himself as someone who has been physically ill in the past, nor is he aware of someone who is sort of morally ill, morally compromised. And I think that's key, that ignorance on those. Both on both those fronts that aligns him sort of with Krogstad and sort of with Rank. But one of the reasons it seems that they have not had much money is because of his refusal to take cases which he thought were improper. So in other words, to act as a lawyer for someone who he felt was guilty is that. So he stands as judge of these clients and if he, as judge, decides that they've done something that he doesn't want to associate with because he's very concerned about being contaged by other people's wickedness. 14:10 Wes: Yeah, he and Dr. Rank share that, by the way. 14:13 Erin: Yes, yes. And he believes in both in contagion and in genetic moral disease. We have to take his word for it when he says that Nora is a spendthrift at the beginning of the play because we don't know any better really. And also because he gives a genetic explanation for her being a spendthrift, saying that her father was one as well. But we never get any evidence for this. We do, however, get an indication that the father was involved in some legal trouble and that in that instance, Torvald. Actually this is how Torvald became introduced to Nora, that he was acting as a lawyer for Nora's father and actually betrayed his principles to defend Nora's father for Nora's own sake. So he got Nora under the conditions that he claims he's too good for. To me, there's something that's an indication of the hypocrisy at the very root of their relationship. We have this discussion of propriety at the very beginning of the play. Nora tells Christine about Torvald's promotion. Nora says how wonderful it is. And she says, as a lawyer. So prior to this he's been a lawyer, now he's been made the director of the bank. And she says, as a lawyer, one's income is so unreliable, especially when one doesn't want to handle any affairs except those that are right and proper. And that's something Torvalds never wanted to do, of course, and I'm entirely with him there. So I take that to mean that he wants to be a judge and a lawyer, so he won't take a case unless it's right and proper, which probably means that he won't defend someone he suspects might be guilty. Is that, is that a proper interpretation of this? 15:55 Wes: Yeah. 15:56 Erin: And then we learn he defended Nora's father, who Torvald is quite, quite mean about, by the way. I mean, I wouldn't, you know, this man is dead. And I would be pretty upset if someone was saying this to about a family member of mine. But they're talking about Krogstad and Nora's talking about how afraid of him he is. And Helmer says, you're thinking of your father, of course. And Nora says, oh yes, that. That's it, yes. Remember how those evil minded people wrote in the newspapers about daddy and slandered him so horribly I think they would have got him dismissed if the department hadn't sent you over to look into it. And if you hadn't been so obliging and helpful to Him. And Torvald replies, my little Nora, there's a significant difference between your father and myself. Your father wasn't an unimpeachable public servant, but I am and hope to remain so for as long as I am in my post. So perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but I take this to be the origin of their acquaintance. So he must have met Nora because he was defending Nora's father. Nora's father did something wrong, but Torvald must have compromised on his principles in that instance to defend the father in order to win Nora. 17:04 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because he's talking about his unimpeachability in that context. Sorry, in the context of not wanting to be corrupted by external influence, namely her influence in keeping Krogstad in his post. And that's also the point where he says he would take everything on himself if anything happened. So he says, you know, my dear Nora, I forgive you the anxiety you're going through here, even if it's essentially an insult to me. Oh, yes, it is an insult. Or isn't it perhaps an insult to believe that I would be worried about some wretched hack lawyer's revenge, But I do nevertheless forgive you because it's such sweet testimony to your great love for me. You'll see I'm a man enough to take everything upon myself, and then a little later we'll share it. Nora as husband and wife. I think this is midway through the play, and it's like the very midpoint of the play where she suddenly gets charged with this idea of what she calls the miraculous thing. The miraculous thing is just what he described, this bit about being able to take everything upon himself, of not being worried about exposure, if that's what Krogstad desires to do. So yeah, he's much more believing in his unimpeachability at that point. Not just in the sense of not being subject to corruption, but not being subject to bad press. 18:32 Erin: Yeah, and he said prior to this as well that he's talked about a sort of putrid environment in the home as a result of lies or as a result of parents having a negative effect on the morality of their children, which seems to be a combination of this genetic idea and this contagion idea. So somehow it seems to be inherited, but also it's the environment created by the bad behavior of a parent that can infect the child. So it's a sort of double barreled infection. And he particularly ascribes this to mothers. But he says fathers are also capable of this. And so one then thinks about. Because he. In their final confrontation scene, he mentions Nora's father having been an indication that Nora would be not a suitable mother, not a fit mother. And so he's therefore betrayed his personal principles, it seems, by defending the father and therefore subjecting himself to sort of close contact with, you know, this infected person and also subjected his children to. No, he's betrayed both of these barrels, if you will, by getting involved with Nora, because Nora, as the daughter of her father, would have this genetic. Sorry, I'm not, I, I, I'm, I meant to bring this back around to what you were saying in regards to bad press and things like that. And now I can't remember how I was going to do that. But anyway, I wanted to go back around back and circle back around to Nora's father and talk about that as well. But anyway, how can I, how can I just shut this down quickly and move us along? 20:13 Wes: I think this is very important about. Because Dr. Rank and Torvald, friends from early childhood, have this idea about what society is, which is to say it's something that's eroded by lies and eroded by mistrust. And this is, I think Rank is the first person to express this idea when he's talking to Nora and Christine. This is around 20 pages in, but he starts by talking about his own misery. Well, he says it's interesting because Christine was talking about climbing the stairs slowly, and he says, oh, you have a touch of the internal rots. Yeah. And she's like, no more. It's just about exhaustion. And then he accuses her of coming to unwind at various festive gatherings. And she's like, no, I've come here to try to look for work, actually. And then he says, I suppose that's a proven remedy for exhaustion, is it? This is our introduction to Dr. Rank. I think it's such a powerful. He's such a interesting sidekick character here. But he's fun. 21:19 Erin: Oh, yeah. I love that. 21:20 Wes: His pessimism and Eeyore, like, quality is a lot of fun. Christine says, we have to live. Doctor. And this is a theme that comes up again and again. And ultimately it's referring to the material dependence of women on men because Christine had, you know, married someone she didn't love and rejected Krogstad because she needed the money, because she had to support her brothers and her mother, so she had to sacrifice the love of Croxtad for the love of her family. And then Rank says, you know, with a nice sarcasm, yes, it is Indeed, a commonly held belief that is, that such a thing is necessary, right? Having to live. And Nora's like, come on, come, come, Dr. Rank, you want very much to live, too. And he says, yes, of course I do. However miserable I may be, I still prefer to be tormented for as long as is possible. And the same goes for all my patients as it does for the morally afflicted, too. Right now, in fact, there's just such a moral invalid in there with Helmer. So he turns us from the idea of having to live despite misery and physical illness. And then, you know, Christine having the rots because she's climbing the stairs. Slowly, he turns from that to the idea of Merle Rot and Krogstad in particular, right? Rotten right down to the roots of. He uses this word rotten repeatedly. Rotten right down to the roots of his character. But even he started to talk as though it was of some magnificent import about his having to live. Turning Christine's words back against her. Having to live. Right. That's another area in which one might sacrifice honor for the sake of love. And then he'll end up saying, you have the kind of people who scamper breathlessly around sniffing for moral decay, only to get the individual admitted for observation in some favorable position or other. The healthy people just have to put up with being left outside. So his idea here is that this isn't about reform or correction. That's not what punishment is about. We should find the sick people, the morally sick people, and then exclude them from society. And then when Christine says, surely it's the sick who should be brought in the fold. And Rank says, it's that attitude that turns society into an infirmary. And Nora just laughs, and he says, what are you laughing at? Do you actually know what society is? And then she says, that's boring. I'm going to talk about something else. But it. Right. So, yeah, what is society? Society is something corrupted by sickness. Of course, you know, he's rank. His speak, and he's rank. I don't know if the double entendre is there in the original. 24:03 Erin: I was wondering about that, too. 24:05 Wes: But he's sick. He's rotten. He's rotten because of the sins of his fathers being visited upon him. And likewise, society becomes rotten in an atmosphere of lies and mistrust. At some point, Torvald makes the comment that he feels physically ill in Krogstad's proximity. So you get this interesting transition from moral illness to physical illness. And the same thing with rank. Dr. Rank, right. He has a physical illness because of his father's moral sickness, being with prostitutes and so on. Syphilis. But anyway, I just wanted to emphasize that thematic role of sickness here. 24:44 Erin: Sure. Well, let's take a closer look at Rank and at Krogstad for that matter. And Christine, by the way, this rank quotage just occurs to me. However miserable I may be, I still prefer to be tormented for as long as is possible. I'm 90% sure you have said almost that exact thing to me. 25:02 Wes: Great. 25:03 Erin: Wow, that's. 25:04 Wes: So that's the character I wanted to be compared to. 25:06 Erin: Of course. Of course. Well, I think that. I think this is Ibsen a little bit. Right. I mean, Ibsen toying with some social Darwinism is, you know, self parodying or whatever. There's a little bit of Stockman in rank. 25:20 Wes: No, yeah, I mean, I think. I think Ibsen here, this is one of the other things I was going to say is, I mean, Ibsen is Nora. Ibsen is a character in this play. Ibsen is Nora. And reading more Ibsen now and reading into the, you know, some of the background stuff, I have a much more palpable sense of how much he despises society's hypocrisy and the moralism here. And this is really an attack on that. And after the Nora dances the tarantella, Torvald becomes a critic. He says a storming success, which was well deserved, although there was something a little over natural about her rendition. I mean, a little more than was, strictly speaking, opposite to artistic requirements. Right. The sorts of criticisms that Ibsen has heard about his own work here. So, yeah, we should, as always be conscious of the fact that this critique of the condition of women in society, although Ibsen is a little bit lukewarm about characterizing it that way, but it's also a critique of what society inevitably does to the artist or to the work of art. And Torvald is trying to do to Nora in part is to turn her into the embroidered work of art that he would like, as opposed to this thing that's been knitted, the deeper thing that's been knitted together. 26:40 Erin: Right. And the dancing is the cure, Right? It's the dancing itself. I mean, the tarantella, you know, maybe for listeners who don't know, though I think a lot of people know this, that it's this thought to be the result of being bitten by a tarantula. And you would be compelled to. To dance out, to sweat out the poison through dance. So this is the cure for these societal ills. If we could think of Nora as being contaged with illness herself, that she then has to dance out through the tarantella. The artistic response to society's ills is the primary one. 27:17 Wes: I mean, in this case, it's. The illness that Ibsen is diagnosing is precisely the opposite, in a way, of what Rank and Torvald are diagnosing. 27:27 Erin: That's right. 27:27 Wes: They want society to adhere to their very strict values. But that's where Ibsen sees the sickness. So, yeah, her doing that dance. Right. I think someone does it Rank who says she looked like she was dancing for her life. Someone says that you're dancing like your life depended on it. Oh, this is when she's practicing. I think you're dancing as if your life depended on it. And she's dancing more and more wildly. And Nora says. And it does. So, yeah, at that point. Right, right. The poison that she has to sweat out is Torvald himself. But, yeah, go ahead. 28:00 Erin: And also all of patriarchal society, if you will. Right. Part of the actual purpose for this dance was to give an outlet of intense exertion for women, a sort of emotional stress release to dance this. At least that was my understanding from older Italian women in my family telling me this is the understanding as well, that women would dance frenetically this way to kind of get out their stress. The tarantella is a perfect thing. You know, it's so funny. It kind of. I always forget that she does this, and it kind of comes out of nowhere in this Norwegian play, you know, but it's a perfect symbol for the not that Nora is trying to work out. 28:45 Wes: You know, Ibsen does give us every chance to sympathize with Torvald because he does beg and plead at the end. And, you know, I'll change. She's like, no. So he really. There's an incredible harshness to the ending. Ibsen knew what he was doing. Right. He knew this was gonna be predictably. It was gonna make people very uncomfortable. There's a justice to what she's doing, but. But he doesn't soften the blow at all or make her look compassionate in the end. She goes into clarity mode, and then she's got to do what she's got to do. 29:18 Erin: Well, she's compassionate to herself or something. She's. I don't know, Compassionate as me, me, me. 29:26 Wes: To go back to that critic. 29:28 Erin: Right, right. 29:30 Wes: That's the new woman of today. Me, me, me. 29:33 Erin: Yeah. 29:34 Wes: Yeah. 29:34 Erin: Quite a contrast to Christine. Yeah. 29:36 Wes: Who needs someone to love, and Christine needs someone to work for. 29:40 Erin: Yeah, she's a real codependent. 29:45 Wes: Gives her life meaning. 29:46 Erin: Evil husband has been dead for two seconds before she gets into relationship. 29:50 Wes: A new evil husband. 29:52 Erin: Yes, exactly. Exactly. But one who's instantly transformed by Christine's love, which that I find far less believable than Nora's ending, is Krogstad's sudden transformation. 30:06 Wes: Look, there are two shipwrecks passing each other. 30:10 Erin: Yes, exactly, Exactly. 30:11 Wes: But not in the night. And I don't know how they're moving, but they're two shipwrecks coming together and making one beautiful ship. 30:19 Erin: Isn't it better for there to be two people on the same boat, which I take to be. Then you have. When one of you dies, the other one has something to eat. 30:26 Wes: That's a. I didn't quite. I'm a man shipwrecked on a broken vessel, and I, too, am sitting like a woman shipwrecked on a broken vessel. Nobody to grieve for, nobody to provide for. What if two shipwrecked people were to cross, to reach across to each other just coincidentally, shipwrecked right near each other? Is one shipwreck big enough for both of them? You know Jack got kicked off the board at the end of Titanic. 31:01 Erin: That's an entirely different debate. Okay, let's not go there, because I feel myself itching to talk about this. That's another door that slams shut. 31:12 Wes: But in any case, yeah, you were. Yeah. Maybe the Krogstad's transformation is not that believable, but I don't know. I have a bit of a place in my heart for Krogstad because he is, after all, more honest in a way than Torvald. 31:26 Erin: Oh, of course. I think even Nora has sympathy for him on 138. She says, so that's why this poor Krogstad. So she calls him this poor Krogstad after he's just threatened her. There's this interesting idea with Krogstad, too, because he also is a friend of Thorvald's from youth. And part of Krogstad's great offense seems to be. So he's acted in a way that has betrayed his own honor or something. Or he's. Because of his forgery, which he's then somehow gotten away with, he maintains this stain on his reputation. 32:03 Wes: He had a good lawyer, Right? 32:05 Erin: Right. But part of his great offensiveness to Torvald is the familiarity with which he treats Torvald. So Torvald doesn't want this unclean person to come near him. You know, we're made to understand by the notes anyway, that perhaps what Krogstad is doing is considered too familiar, just in general. Not just for someone as snooty and picky as Torvald is, but he has known him from the time that they were young boys. And then Nora tries to pull rank on him, confusingly. Sorry, I should use a different word. But there's this whole idea of subordination and influence in their conversation, which is quite interesting. Right. So she claims to have a certain influence over Torvald, then completely does a 180 when she realizes she's gotten herself into a bind. It becomes this race to the bottom. It's like, which of us is more abject? You, Krogstad in a subordinate position at a bank, or me, a mere woman in a subordinate position to my husband? You know, they're sort of like trying to out victim each other in Krogstad trying to sort of play on her sympathy in a way. 33:10 Wes: Yeah. 33:11 Erin: There's also a sense that Krogstad has done whatever crime he did commit, he might have had. You know, there's this question of motivation as well. Obviously this is at the heart of Nora's self defense, that she might have forged this document, but she had a good motivation for doing so. Motivation is everything, Nora points out. And Krogstad has to tell her that, you know, the law does not care about motivations. And she says, then it must be a bad law and you must be a bad lawyer. But the implication is that perhaps he also had his motivations as well. And there's some desperation. We never know what the circumstances were of his forgery, but we are told, or it's implied that it was out of some kind of desperation. And even Torvald himself says usually when people commit forgeries, it's out of some sort of desperate motive. Krogstad says to her, but you didn't consider the fact that you were committing fraud against me. And it aligns with what Torvald says earlier about if something happened to Torvald, what would Nora do? How would she repay debts? So if they took out loans and then Torvald dies, how would Nora go about paying off those loans? And Nora very smartly says, if something that ghastly happened, it would make no odds to me whether I was in debt or not. So if you were to die, what would I care if I was also in debt? You know, which is absolutely right. And Torvald says, perhaps so, but to the people I'D borrowed from. And Nora says them. Who's bothered about them? They're just strangers. So, like, why is Torvald thinking about her creditors rather than the situation that Nora herself would be in? Because it seems to be entirely about appearances for him. He cares about his honor after he's gone. He cares about the ability to sort of pay back a loan and thereby secure his reputation even in death or something. But there's this sense that, like, she's focused on him, and were this terrible thing to happen, then who cares if she's in debt or not? She would be destroyed by the loss of him. And he cares about the people that she borrows money from getting back their money. Like, he doesn't care about the fact that she might be left in this terrible position, that she would be so devastated that she would have a lot more to worry about than just having creditors. And so it seems that Krogstad and Torvald are aligned in this emphasis on the collective as opposed to the individual. Something like that. Right. The idea of repaying a loan for the sake of the person who's loaned you the money. They seem to have less of an appreciation of the personal and are more interested in this sort of societal matrix, which has to be respected and which is fundamentally impersonal. 35:56 Wes: Yeah. Although I think Krogstad is just using that in that moment. But. 36:00 Erin: Right, right. 36:00 Wes: Because he himself, of course, has committed the same violation and is committing another violation in blackmailing her. So he's appealing to a moral motive in a way by talking about fraud or legal transgression and a moral transgression. But, yeah, his behavior is amoral up to the point where he finds love again. 36:21 Erin: For someone who has a lot of kids, he seems to be kind of an incel or something because Christine left him, and then he was mad for years and years, and so finally he just gets what he wants. He gets his girlfriend back. Yeah, that seems to be the basis of his criminal career. 36:40 Wes: Cured by love. 36:41 Erin: Cured by love. 36:42 Wes: Yeah, that was fun. We're gonna have to. 36:44 Erin: Yeah, we'll have to close the door. 36:45 Wes: Slam the door on this. But, yeah, we're gonna be. I guess we'll do Jaws next, and then we'll have more Ibsen. 36:53 Erin: Sounds perfect. 36:54 Wes: So, Enemy of the People. Cool. Thank you. 36:56 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the Nora of Act I, the charming toy of the men in her life who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband’s recent promotion is set to provide, and the Nora of Act III, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self-determination? Wes & Erin discuss Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” Upcoming Episodes: Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Nora helmer begins Act 1 as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act 3 by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts, representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers, makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the nora of Act 1, the charming toy of the men in her life, who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband's recent promotion is set to provide, and the nora of Act 3, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self determination. Today we're discussing Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just before we started recording, you mentioned that your cat really likes treats. 1:34 Wes: And 1:37 Erin: my understanding is you make her work for them. Is that right? Like you put them in little gold envelopes on the Christmas tree and you make her do the tarantella. 1:47 Wes: Well, she actually left me recently. She had a very stern talk with me. She was like, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. 1:57 Erin: And you were like, I don't understand you. It's like we're speaking different languages. And she was like, meow, you've never respected me. 2:04 Wes: Now we're strangers. You don't understand my species. And she slammed the door. Somehow she managed, with a little paws. It was the slam heard round the block. What is it? Who came up with this? The door slam heard round the world phrase? You've heard that? 2:27 Erin: No. 2:27 Wes: Some critic must have come up with that. Yeah, that's how the end of the play is often characterized. 2:32 Erin: Oh, that's great. Have you read much criticism on A Doll's House in preparation for today? Because I did at one point, many years ago. So we'll see how much I remember. 2:42 Wes: Not much. I just went and looked at contemporaneous criticism. I always find it fun to look at the critical heritage books. These are Routledge books. And this is One on Ibsen by Michael Egan. And basically they go through major works and then responses to those major works. So Doll's House, there's like. I read all of what was available, like an unsigned notice in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily News. So this is for the performance in England, which happened in 1889, I think a few years after he published it. And one thing I think I learned from reading on background is how important translation is to Ibsen. And he very quickly became much more than a Norwegian playwright. Right. He's Norwegian. Just get confused because Denmark and Norway were. Right. They were unified up to a certain point. But, yeah, so he started, you know, I think he made a big international splash eventually. And certainly this play, Doll's House, made a big splash in England and was the source of some critical controversy. I read something by Janet Achurch on the difficulty of being Nora that she published. She was the actress in that first English language rendition in London. And it's very typical actress talk like this took so much out. This is the hardest but most rewarding role I've ever had. And blah, blah, blah. And then William Archer, his, I think, first English translator, published a defense in a newspaper. I think it's to Clement Scott. But anyway, yeah, there's a critic, you know, who's very strongly anti Ibsen. And as you can imagine, this play caused some controversy, not, as you might think, because of the feminist message. I think I mentioned this to you when we last talked that I think it's Scott who's kind of offended at the idea that anyone would need to be lectured about women's rights in their day and age when it had been solved for 100 years, at least in England. Maybe in Norway you still have problems, but here in England, we don't need to be lectured. But then he goes on to. There's a typical objection to Nora's seemingly sudden transformation at the end of the play. So that's a sort of craftsmanship type of objection. There's an objection to him being too preachy. Art shouldn't be this preachy. But then there is the kind of moralistic objection to the horror of her leaving her kids behind. 5:14 Erin: Sure. 5:15 Wes: Which made me think of Medea a bit. I started thinking about Medea when I was rereading. I think I read this three times in preparation for this, and the third time took notes. I'm like, huh, this is interesting. This is. You know, there's a lot of differences, of course, and she's not a sorceress, she's just a Spendthrift. She does have the tarantella. Is that how you pronounce it? The tarantelle? 5:37 Erin: Tarantella, yeah. 5:39 Wes: Tarantella. But anyway, we can get into all that. But, yeah, that's my summary of the contemporaneous critical reaction. 5:46 Erin: My understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, this is a bit hazy, was that it was actually a bigger scandal for her to leave her husband. I know there been differing reports on this, but it was a bigger scandal for her to have left her husband than for her to leave the children. Because of the way that Norwegian society was. I mean, the children are already kind of being raised by Anne Marie anyway. It seems they just, you know, they come in for Nora to play hide and seek with them and et cetera. Though it is noted she spends a lot of time with the children. More time than most mothers do. But it seems that the bigger scandal in the minds of certain critics, I thought, was leaving the husband. That isn't to say that, you know, maternal feeling didn't exist and that it was a bigger. Emotionally, it would have been more higher stakes for her to leave the children. But in terms of propriety and what society might have demanded, it was perhaps more scandalous for her to leave the husband than the children at that time. 6:43 Wes: Yeah, maybe it was in Norway. My impression from the English reaction was it was more about the. It was about both, but more about the children. So actually, now that I'm looking at this, I think it'd just be fun to give you a little bit of a taste of some of this criticism. Should we do that? So this is Clement Scott in Theater, the journal Theater in 1889. It is an unlovely, selfish creed. But let women hear it. Nora, when she finds her husband is not the ideal hero she imagined, determines to cap his egotism with her selfishness, which he takes to be vengeful. Pardon. She cannot grant humiliation. She will not recognize the frivolous butterfly. The Swedish Frou-Frou, the spoiled plaything has mysteriously become an Ibsenite revivalist. There were no previous signs of her conversion, but she has exchanged playfulness for preaching. So this is one of the more technical criticisms that she had too sudden a transformation, forgets all her responsibilities and does a thing that one of the lower animals would not do. A cat or dog would tear anyone who separated from its offspring. But the socialistic Nora, the apostle of the new creed of humanity, leaves her children almost without a pang. It is self, self, self. This is the ideal woman of the new creed. Not a woman who is the fountain of love and forgiveness and charity. Not the pattern woman we have admired in our mothers and our sisters. Not the model of unselfishness and charity, but a mass of aggregate conceit and self sufficiency who leaves her home and deserts her friendless children because she has herself to look after. 8:19 Erin: And is this guy the basis for the character Torvald or just. Is that just a coincidence? Wow. That's pretty incredible. 8:27 Wes: Yeah. So you get there's a more reasonable, nuanced. Some unsigned notices which are more reasonable. But you get the idea of what my general sense was. The thing with the children was more objectionable to this English response. But this was. I think this is six years after it came out in Norway. You know, I think there are significant differences. There were very significant differences at the time between those. Norway was a much more conservative culture at that point. 8:52 Erin: Sure. 8:53 Wes: Than England. Yeah. 8:54 Erin: Well, listeners will have to forgive me. My thinking on the play probably has been heavily influenced by a couple of people who I'll name in just a minute, but I have not read their writings on this in a very long time. I thought it would be actually better for me to kind of come in a little bit fresher because A Doll's House was my first Ibsen play and I know it a little too well or something. I don't know. I was worried about being too influenced by criticism on it. So I, in the past have read Hardwick on Nora, which I think I mentioned in our Hedda Gabler episode. I think we read a little bit from Hardwick on Hedda and Stella Adler's lectures on A Doll's House, which I really, really recommend. I think the reason why I read Ibsen for the first time and why I read this play first was because of Hannah and her sisters. Right. Because it's mentioned that Hannah plays Nora in A Doll's House and her mother says something about how it must be hard to act like Torvald's little chipmunk without making a total ass of yourself. Or I know that it's hard, you know, like she. She mentions something about making an ass of yourself, like it's difficult to play Nora without doing so. And then I remember having done a little reading about A Doll's House after, because I was curious the first time I had seen Hannah and her sister. The great acting challenge that playing Nora represents. I think that probably is then what inspired me to start reading Stella Adler on Nora, because I have a great many of Stella Adler's books, which I just really recommend. In general, she's kind of a hero of mine. But anyway. Yeah. So the question is. I mean, I suppose the big question of this play is how we link the Nora of the first act and the Nora of the third act together. 10:34 Wes: Yeah, good question. Yeah, good. 10:36 Erin: I believe that Hardwick. And this is why I didn't want to revisit it, because I thought it would be difficult for me to come up with my own answer to this. I believe that Hardwick identifies her innate freedom and sense of independence from the very beginning, as exemplified in her generosity, as being the sort of connective tissue. I noted a few places where she. I mean, she never tells Torvald about her sacrifice. And that, to me, is indicative of the fact that she is actually a little bit more. That the condescension between them goes both ways. And it reveals the fact that she was never comfortable enough to divulge her secret to him, to really have this. This open communication between them. And so she gets to kind of have this little secret that she's. I mean, it's a noble one, but that she's, in a sense, taken care of him, knowing that she's taken care of him, even as he believes that he's taking care of her in the confrontation scene between the two of them. We're reading from the Penguin Classics edition, A Doll's House and Other Plays, which is. I believe it's the first one on Amazon. When you search for A Doll's House. I like this translation quite a bit. It's translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. Excuse my pronunciation there, but anyway, so this is on page 185 in that edition. Helmer asks her, if religion can't direct you, then at least let me stir your conscience, for surely you have some moral sense. Or answer me. Perhaps you have none. And Nora replies, oh, Torvald, that's not easy to answer. I simply don't know. I'm in such confusion over these things. I just know that my opinion is very different from yours on such matters. So an indication that she's been disagree. She's actually disagreed with him all along and just has not felt comfortable enough to say so, or has just been lying to herself about these disagreements or hasn't been fully aware of them. So something in her, in other words, has kept her from sharing parts of herself with him. An innate distrust, an innate sense that perhaps he wasn't equal to being in this. This full understanding with her even before she was quite aware of that impulse in herself to hide it. She didn't know that she was hiding these things, but she was. 12:52 Wes: So it came out in Copenhagen in 1879, ten years before the British premiere. So I got that wrong. And then I forgot to mention, I also watched version that I actually watched was the 1992 BBC version with Juliet Stevenson. And I thought of this just because you were talking about how difficult it would have been to perform that part. And, I mean, it's an amazing version. Is there one you recommend? 13:19 Erin: No, I haven't seen one I like and I've never seen that BBC version. I think I saw the one with Jane Fonda ages ago. 13:26 Wes: Okay. 13:26 Erin: Which is a very loose, from what I remember, very loose adaptation of the play. 13:31 Wes: So check it out. I mean, I just. I think it's great. And they play Torvald more aggressively than I actually read him, but it works. And then I thought, oh, it's interesting how there's quite a range for how you might play the Torvald character, either accentuating his weakness or accentuating some of his aggressiveness. And it reminds me, we're going to read next time we're going to read Enemy of the People. Right? 13:53 Erin: Yeah. If you'd like to. 13:54 Wes: I don't know of a good. There's a movie version of that with what's his face. It's not Paul Newman or. 14:02 Erin: Oh, Steve McQueen. 14:05 Wes: Steve McQueen, yeah. But I don't know of any available. I couldn't find anything available, like, any rendition of the play that's easily available online, except for, like, you know, high school productions and stuff like that. 14:18 Erin: On Criterion, there's an Indian adaptation directed by Ray, which is quite interesting, though it really, I think, makes Stockman a far more straightforward hero. The assembly scene is kind of butchered, and then the ending is sort of butchered as well. So it's a much more straightforward. So it's sort of a disappointment, which I hesitate to say, because I love Ray. This is a late film in his career, I want to say. Came out in 89. It's an interesting film to watch. 14:46 Wes: There's also a BBC adaptation. Just again, talking about Enemy of the People. You know, it's based on the play, but it's quite different, so I didn't watch that. 14:54 Erin: But I'd recommend people watch Jaws if they want to see an Enemy of the People. 14:59 Wes: Well, Jaws is what I was suggesting that I was going to suggest that we do Jaws since it's the big anniversary now after Enemy of the People. 15:08 Erin: Okay, sure. We could. Or we could do it in between. I mean, a Lot of. I think a lot of people will see. 15:12 Wes: Or we could do it in between. That's a great idea. 15:13 Erin: The connection. If they're not already aware of, of the connection between the two. 15:17 Wes: Let's do that. We're going to need a bigger podcast. No, I'm just kidding. I was thinking, is this going to be too gory for Erin? And I thought, well, they couldn't get the shark to work, so you never see it, so it's the perfect horror movie for you. 15:31 Erin: I was just going, I was just going to watch it a couple nights ago and then I realized I was too scared to watch it. So I'm going to have to. 15:38 Wes: You have to force your. Yourself. 15:40 Erin: Force myself. I've seen it before, but never like the full, you know, I've walked out of the room. Etc. I'll have to put on my big girl pants. 15:48 Wes: Yeah. Prepare by listening to the soundtrack and then you'll be, you'll be ready for the terrible thing, the miraculous thing. Speaking of. 15:55 Erin: Yeah. 15:56 Wes: All right, so see how I brought that back around? 15:58 Erin: Very, very clever. 15:59 Wes: All right. Sorry for that long, that long detour. But the question you're asking is about how do we, how do we connect who Nora is or seems to be earlier on in the play with who she becomes later on? How do you can we defend Ibsen against these critics who say this is far too rapid a transformation and is just kind of ad hoc in serving the political message that he wants to give? And I thought it was interesting that in a way, the transformation begins offstage. It begins before the play begins, and it begins with her committing fraud in order to get the money to take, to basically take a one year vacation, which is supposed to save Torvald's life. Right. Is this how people really got off work for one year? So I'm going to die unless I get a one year vacation. We have to go to some hot springs somewhere because we don't have real medicine yet. So. 17:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Why have I not used this Before? 17:04 Wes: Got the 19th century version of cancer called, you know, consumptive degeneration of my liver or whatever. Get some hot springs and it'll be cured. 17:15 Erin: No, he goes to Capri. Even better. 17:18 Wes: To me, it seems like a bit that, like this is a delusional idea on her part that this vacation was actually something life saving. But I put a kind of bookmark in that because maybe it would seem more plausible to the audiences at the time. But in any case, it strikes me that we learn in the play that she is Very proud of doing that because it was an assertion of her independence. So let me just find the place. When she's telling Christine. We're going to call her Christine. When she's telling Christine about it, I think what induces her to talk about it is that Christine is sort of being condescending to her about, oh, you don't, you know, you've never seen any real problems in life, and you think the handiwork that you had to do was real work and blah, blah, blah. You know, Christine, of course, is the one who said real problems and tragedy in her life and has had to work her ass off. And so Nora will say, and this is, unfortunately, I read the same translation as you, but my pagination is different because I used an electronic version. But this is about 14 pages in. But now I'm going to tell you something, Christine. I also have something to be proud and happy about. And then she'll go on to say that she saved Torvald's life, basically, and that she didn't rely on her father's money to do it, she raised it herself. So she's pointing there to her own resourcefulness, her own independence and something that she can be proud of. And in doing that, right, she sets up the chain of events that will lead her to actually become independent. Because it's by doing that that she'll find out that Torvald is not the person that she thought he was. And the person that she thought he was was a person who would take the guilt onto herself. Right. That the she. Throughout the play, the various points in the play, she's talking about the miraculous thing that she's waiting for. And Torvald directly gives her this idea by suggesting that he wants to sacrifice himself to save her and that she ever got in trouble, he would, you know, he would be there to do that. So she gets that idea eventually in her mind that, you know, if this were all found out, he would take the guilt upon himself. And it's not just a miraculous thing, but a terrible thing because she would not let that happen. And she would have to commit suicide to stop that from happening. Turns out suicide wasn't necessary because Torvald was not that kind of man. Completely throws her under the bus. Later on, she'll say to Torvald, Torvald will say, yes, I love you, and there's a lot of things I would do for you, but no one would ever take dishonor on themselves for the sake of love. 20:01 Erin: Yes. 20:01 Wes: And she's like hundreds of thousands of women do that every day. So when she's committing the fraud and gets the idea that he will, you know, she's doing something dishonorable, maybe. Depends on what you think of the law, right? Is it dishonorable if it's for the sake of love, but she's doing a thing that could harm her reputation, harm his reputation, but it's an invitation to him in a way, to be put in the position that women, on her view, are being put in. Right? A position of dishonor, which in her case is a position where her independence and autonomy have been compromised. So that's what she seems to be doing unconsciously by engaging in this activity. And she's going to find out that he won't join her there. And if he can't join her in the dishonor of her dependence, at least empathetically, then she will have to assert her complete independence and reclaim her honor that way. So she sets. Do you see what I'm saying? It's a really cool catalyst that gets all this stuff going, this idea that she has that she's gonna put honor at risk for the sake of love and then see what comes out of it. And it gets her out of a bad relationship. It's one way to do it. Right. Ultimately, it sets the dominoes in motion. So I think that is part of what joins the earlier Nora to the later Nora, which is that it seems to be unconscious, but at a certain level, she is ruminating on her independence and acting on that urge for independence. 21:45 Erin: Just to be clear, the dishonor enters on the mere fact of her having borrowed money. Is that what we're to. 21:53 Wes: Well, it's mainly the fraud, Right? So the dishonor is about the fraud. So it's one thing the way it's cast at various points in the play. Yeah, it's a bad thing to be in debt. Torvald doesn't like that. But it's another thing altogether to have signed her father's name as a co signer in order to get that money and essentially to have done the same thing that Krogstad had done to get himself in trouble. Right. So there's a object lesson, right, in the form of a character in the play. What could happen if I do something like this? It's to become Krogstad, who is cast by Dr. Rank as. And by Torvald to some extent, as the sort of emblem of moral sickness which is manifested in ranks, right? Syphilitic sickness that he got from his. From his Father. 22:44 Erin: Right. 22:45 Wes: In parallel to Nora getting her extravagance and loose morals from her father. Right. There's a lot of little. 22:53 Erin: Supposedly. Right. 22:54 Wes: Neat tricks in this play. There's a lot of really, really cool stuff. It's such a tightly. You know, once you start looking at it, it's such a tight, well done piece of work. I don't know. Do people need me to tell them that? 23:05 Erin: Yes, of course. 23:06 Wes: To tell them that Ibsen is a really. Right. But anyway, that's what I'm referring to. With the possibility of dishonor. 23:12 Erin: Yes. Yeah. So she forges her father's signature because she needs a man's signature to give her permission to take the loan. Is that right? A woman can't take a loan herself. 23:24 Wes: Okay. I think I misunderst. I thought maybe he was co signer. But that makes. 23:29 Erin: Or he has to co sign the loan because a woman can. 23:31 Wes: Just because she can't do it. Okay. 23:32 Erin: Right. So she takes on her father's patriarchal authority by signing his name. I like this idea that that act is the way that she sets this plot in motion. Right. Something that's happened long before. 23:46 Wes: Let me correct it, actually. Sorry, I'm just looking at it. So Krogstad says, beneath that I added a few lines in which your father stood as guarantor for the debt. So it sounds like he was actually a co signer. As in the. 23:59 Erin: He's a cosign. 24:00 Wes: Yeah. She's taken out a loan and you know. So she doesn't have the credit. I think your point is well taken. She might not have the credit because she's Principally because she's a woman. Or clearly she doesn't. In two senses. Right. 24:13 Erin: Married women were formally with. This is from a note to. A wife can't borrow without her husband's consent. This is a note in our edition. Married women were formerly without independent legal status and were not allowed to enter into economic transactions on their own. Although this was not always adhered to in practice. So this is why she had to have a co signer. She gives herself permission, she acts as her own father to give herself permission to take the. To borrow. So there's the idea of her having committed this fraud, and then there's the idea of her having borrowed money at all. Both of these things are seen as dishonorable to Torvald, who's very concerned with wholeness. This is one of the themes that comes up again and again for him. He does not like to owe anything to anyone and he likes things to Be whole. There are a few indications of this. He has a speech about borrowing, which we could go back to. But later on, Nora tells Christine to leave the room because Torvald's about to come in. And she says he can't bear to see mending and darning. Part of this is because he can't. He has an allergy to certain elements of feminine activity. He does not like, for instance, to be around Nora when she's with the children. He even separates Nora from Christine in that regard. He invites Christine to leave the room with him because he can't stand to be around mothers. So rather than assigning this, rescribing this as a sort of female trait, in which case Christine would be subject to it as well. It's as if Nora as a mother is a different species. And he invites Christine to leave with him because Christine is not, in fact, a mother, right? She's had sort of like a motherly responsibility by acting as a surrogate mother to her younger brothers and even, in a way, to her own mother. But she has not given birth and therefore is like a different species from Nora in that instance. So he has this dislike of certain elements, either of feminine activities or of activities indicative of motherhood, which we could say, psychologically, he sees Nora as being his predominantly his sexual plaything. And motherhood stands in the way, I think, of that, whatever we want to call it, his idealization of her, his objectification. That's the word I wanted to use, his objectification of her. But this mending and darning. So we can associate that, on the one hand, with his dislike of these network of activities which suggest that a mother has to do with shaping, giving shape to things, which seems to stand in competition with his sense of superiority. And his idea that he, as a father, is really the prime mover. He's the God of the household. And the mother's authority seems to stand in contrast to that. So anything that has to do with a lack of wholeness or with turning something into wholeness that is also at the same time a feminine activity is indicative of motherhood and therefore of a force which competes with his authority. And then this is on page 151. Rank talks about his illness, and he notes that he won't tell Torvald about it because he has such a marked loathing for anything hideous. I don't want him in my sick room, he says. So this I also take as his dislike of people in some state of disarray or things not being whole. As I said, he doesn't like to owe things to other people. He doesn't like to see people mending something. He only likes to see it in its full and sort of resolved, you know, fully constituted state. And he doesn't like to see people ill, somehow reduced from a state of perfection, because he himself is so obsessed with perfection and also of his own. His own moral authority. I'm throwing a lot at you there, but I'm trying to sort of like, tie these things together in real time, because it's connected to this, I think, this dislike of the maternal. But it also has to do with his own sense of satisfaction, for instance, at being a better man than Krogstad, a better man than Nora's father. So it has to do with him as an individual as well. And of course, he only sees other men as being individuals. 28:32 Wes: You're reminding me that later on he'll see Christine knitting and he'll say to 28:38 Erin: her, she should take up embroidery instead. Yeah, yeah. 28:43 Wes: So you knit, do you? She says, yeah, you know what? You should embroider instead. She's like, why? Well, because it's much prettier. Look, you hold the embroidery like this with the left hand, and then with the right, you guide the needle like this out in a delicate, extended arc. Isn't that so? Christine says, yes, free, possibly. And Torvald says, whereas knitting, that can never be anything but unlovely. Look here. The cramped arms, the knitting needles that go up and down. It's got something Chinese about it. 29:14 Erin: God, what an asshole. 29:16 Wes: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems to go with your thesis about wholeness. 29:20 Erin: Yeah. I wonder if embroidery is about adding to ornamenting something which is already whole. Right. And knitting is about creating something. And it's also. It's indicative if it's ugly looking to him. And that kind of. I'm almost seeing what he's describing as being like legs giving birth. Right. There's something about childbirth that's recapitulated, perhaps in the posture of the hands and the needles. 29:45 Wes: Yeah, that's good, I think, right? Yeah. So embroidery, first of all, he wants to be the instructor there, so you could presume he just happens to know more about embroidery than knitting, and he wants to be the one in charge and in control and telling them what to do. Right. And he. Right. He has this relationship to Nora in which he's going to instruct her and then the tarantella and correct her. It's part of the whole theme of him treating her like a doll and a plaything and a helpless Child and all of that. But, yeah, as you point out, whereas knitting, right, you're creating something out of nothing, and it is more akin to childbirth, embroidery. You're embellishing and decorating something. It's more akin to, you know, him dressing, right. He's the one to choose her costume for the masquerade and to essentially dress her in it. His role is to embroider or embellish Nora in order to turn her into an erotic spectacle, let's say something that's appealing to him. That's not just a matter of her appearance, but that's part of it. But also her character, right? There's the suggestion in the end that he can bring her up to be a different sort of wife. At a certain point, he says, you're not going to be allowed to bring up the children when he finds out about what she's done. And in the end, right, she says, yeah, you're right. I'm not equipped to bring up the children, so I'm going to leave them here. So here's what he says. He says there's some truth in what you're saying, however exaggerated and emotional it may be. This is after she's accused him of treating her like a doll in a playhouse. But from now on, it will be different. The time for playing is over. Now comes the time for upbringing. Whose upbringing? Mine or the children's? Both. Yours and the children's. My darling Nora. Oh, Torvald, you're not the man to bring me up to be a proper wife for you. And he says, and you're saying that. She says, and I. How equipped am I to bring up the children? You know, he wants to embroider her to have the kind of appearance that's gonna titillate him and turn him on, right? To kind of accentuate her feminine mystique. But that's all he knows how to do. They're not going to get into the guts of each other. I mean, that's part of the significance, I think, at the final conversation, right, where she says, we've never had a serious conversation. That's more like knitting. That's more like getting. Tearing apart and reconstructing and doing something that's not so superficial as embroidering. 32:12 Erin: That's right. 32:12 Wes: And they would have to change each other and bring each other up or. I mean, her point in the end is that they would both have to be very, very different people to get back together. And they can only become different people by being apart. He, in particular, has to be deprived of his doll if he's gonna grow up. 32:27 Erin: Yes. In that scene, Nora describes herself and the relationship that she's had with him prior to the part that you read. He promises to forgive her for having committed this, you know, terrible sin of saving his life. You know, which I think. I think we're meant to take that very seriously. And my understanding is that the climate was so inhospitable to human life that people did have to go, you know, and kind of like, dry out if they had tb. So we're just gonna have to take that seriously in the same way that we have to take seriously the idea that, you know, that Ibsen really believed, for instance, that syphilis was passed from. From father to son. And it's a. It's a point, a plot point, not only here, but in Ghosts, for instance. 33:16 Wes: Oh, that didn't. That didn't happen. 33:18 Erin: The only way that it could have happened was if the mother of the child was infected and that therefore the syphilis could be passed from mother to child, specifically, I believe, through the vaginal canal. But the idea of inherited syphilis from father to son is not accurate, medically accurate, but it is interesting, you know, so we have to take this as being, I think, for this whole plot to work and for Nora to not be, I don't know, to have done all this for nothing or to not be, like, completely pathetic. We have to understand that this was medical advice she was given and this was taken as a fact that Torvald had to go to Italy to save his life or to a warmer climate. And, I mean, wasn't this done all the time? People with TB had to go to deserts to dry out, et cetera. Right. 34:07 Wes: No, I mean, certainly people were. Yeah, yes. They were getting sick and going off to spas and spring waters and. I mean, Nietzsche just traveled around Europe, kept. He never stayed put after getting sick. So, yeah, I take that seriously. So I was a little bit tongue in cheek by calling it a one year vacation. But on the other hand, what I wonder about is that he doesn't have a specific disease, does he? It's just overwork. It's just like the guy works too hard. Torvald, you're burning the. 34:38 Erin: I thought the subtext was that it was tb. 34:40 Wes: Oh, really? 34:40 Erin: But perhaps I'm bringing. 34:43 Wes: No, Maybe. I think probably I'm the one who's just reading into it. Yeah, that makes more sense. I just. I want to see her as delusional. Right. That's the patriarchy speaking through me. 34:54 Erin: Oh, boy. 34:55 Wes: That was my impression of her early on. Right. She does come across as very frivolous 35:00 Erin: and, oh, I totally dismiss. 35:02 Wes: Added out of touch with reality and out of touch with what she's done with the loan and. Yeah, no, but we can. Okay, let me not derail you. We can discuss that. 35:13 Erin: Well, no, I mean, I think that's a really important point and maybe this will help us get there because I do think she reveals certain key elements of her. I mean, her life with Torvald has not been easy. I think this is important to note. They are just about to come into money. Things are finally turning around for them. But the. The description of previous Christmases in which she was given so little and was working herself all night, and all Torvald could think about was the fact that she was depriving him of her company and she was working herself like crazy to give the children a good Christmas on the very, very little money that 35:46 Wes: they had caused the results. Meager quote unquote. 35:49 Erin: Right, right. And then we learn, for instance, she's 35:51 Wes: trying to make, what, ornaments out of paper or something. She's making do with the best they have, their gifts. 35:56 Erin: She's trying to give the children some nice gifts. And it seems to me that they lived quite a degraded. She's trying to please him with what little he has, and at the same time she's staying up late doing copying and various other things to try and pay back this loan. The other element of this is the way that he treats her with such indignity. So at the bottom of 182, when I look at it now, I think I've lived like a pauper here, just from hand to mouth. I've lived by doing tricks for you, Torvald, but that was how you wanted it. So she's a beggar. And we see this early on. We see that Torvald treats her with tremendous condescension and that she has to hide things from him like she's a child and she has to distract him. She plays upon her looks. She's very aware of her own attractiveness. It's something that she mentioned several times in her conversation with that early conversation with Christine. The ways in which she's traded on her looks in order to get what she wants, or the way she fantasizes about trading on her look to have a wealthy, older benefactor give her money things, things of that nature. Obviously she's thinking in the back of her mind of rank, but it doesn't occur to her that this is what actively in her conscious mind that this is what she's thinking of. At any rate, she's aware of her attractiveness and she's aware of the effect that it has on Torvald. And she basically has to distract him and manipulate him just to be able to eat what she wants to eat. She's not allowed to eat macaroons because he says they're going to be bad for her teeth. She's living with someone who is emotionally borderline abusive and she has very, very little dignity. 37:32 Wes: I agree. I just think that she's conformed. She herself has conformed to it. Right. She's not self aware underneath and scheming to get by, but she is. 37:41 Erin: She's scheming a bit. She's. She's scheming to get what she wants. And I think she is self aware, but. 37:47 Wes: Well, in a. I don't think she knows at the beginning of the play that she's been wronged. No, she doesn't know the things that she, you know, she has an epiphany and then she sees it at the end. But before all that, you know, it's all unconscious and she's just complying and. Yeah, she's scheming in the sense of. And she's doing some lying too. It's not just the fraud. But what does she do? She says that rank or Christine brought the macaroons or something. I forget. 38:13 Erin: Yeah. Very, very childlike defense. 38:16 Wes: Yeah. But she can get away with that, right? Yeah, because she is treated like a child and she's in the position of a child and they have a. You know, I think that's one of the interesting things about the beginning of the play where especially if you see it acted, it's like, okay, is this some cute, fun little banter that this husband and wife have? You know, is it kind of endearing? Do they have a nice little relationship going? And then it just gets kind of sickening. 38:42 Erin: Oh, yes. 38:44 Wes: You know, has my little spending bird been out frittering money again? But it gets sickening in various ways. In a way it's too. Right. There's the element of condescension involved. It's involved. There's her kind of hyper feminine conformity to his condescension. But also. Right. As we learn more and more about what you've called his borderline abusiveness and that becomes more and more apparent and the ways in which she's confined by all this. 39:14 Erin: That's right. And I think that at the very. At the beginning of the play, we see her through Torvald's eyes. You know, we're getting all of this information about her. I mean, he assigns all of these, in addition to the inhuman nicknames he has for her, namely that he repeatedly calls her a squirrel, a bird, various other things that can't speak. Right. 39:37 Wes: She's one. Right. You know, is she a squirrel or a bird? Make a choice. Squirrel or a doll. What's that one? 39:46 Erin: In addition to these pet names he gives her, he's also assigning her the characteristic of being a spendthrift. And I don't take that seriously for one moment. If you look at the evidence, she's not a spendthrift at all. What he's describing, for instance, he says, you're a strange little one, just as your father was. You're forever on the lookout for ways to get money, but as soon as you get it, it's as though it slips through your fingers. You never know what you've done with it. Well, we must take you as you are. It's in the blood. Oh, yes, it is. These things are hereditary, Nora. So he ascribes her father with this flaw as well. Of course, we learn later that this is money, that she's essentially stealing from him to pay. Because it's not her money, it's his money. Right. That's the other element of this. He has no sense of sharing. 40:30 Wes: Well, he also. He ends up counting out money to her shortly after that. So Right. Shortly after he accuses her of frittering it away. He basically is using money. So he says, hmm, is my squirrel standing there sulking? And then he takes out his wallet. What do you think I have here? 40:47 Erin: Yes. 40:47 Wes: Well, it's like he's a stripper and he's going to rain down some dollars on his money. 40:52 Erin: That's exactly. 40:53 Wes: And he's like, here you are. And then 10, 20, 30, 40, which is really in the BBC production. The way they pull that off is really interesting because it's very flirty and very sexual. You're exactly right to be skeptical about his accusations of her extravagance. We don't really see any evidence of that in the play, except for the vacation, which, as you've argued, is probably necessary and is not just a vacation. But anyway, I'm already falling into the trap by calling it a vacation. So we don't see any evidence of that. But we do see evidence of his participation in this whole money thing and his use of that to kind of control her. It's a game. It's the same Sort of game as the tarantella and all the rest of it, the embroidery, it fits into the same game where he can use it to control her. 41:47 Erin: Well, we see someone with a tremendous amount of pomposity and control who accuses someone else of being a spendthrift. Instantly, we know, well, someone like that, a spendthrift, to them is anybody with a normal kind of relationship to money. We can just as easily turn it back around and say, well, how are we to know that he isn't a miser and that she isn't perfectly normal? 42:10 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I do think we get that sense that he is obsessional and the whole thing with debt. He's a bank manager, but he doesn't seem to understand how debt might work to their advantage, which it can. But if you know something about money, it's not a very sophisticated financial position to say, oh, no debt ever. Right. That betrays his flaw. But. Sorry to interrupt you. 42:34 Erin: That's right. No, but she, you know, as Nora says, there's something called quarterly interest, you know, to Christine, and she says, let's see. 42:44 Wes: It's very mysterious and magical and who can keep track of these things? 42:48 Erin: She said, they're terribly difficult to get hold of. 42:50 Wes: Yes. 42:50 Erin: Yeah. So I've had to save a bit here and a bit there, wherever I could. You see, Naturally, I couldn't put much aside from the housekeeping money since Torvald had to live comfortably. Torvald has to live comfortably, but she gets to have little things handed out to her. Naturally, I couldn't put much aside from the housekeeping money, since Torvald had to live comfortably and I couldn't let the children go badly dressed. Whatever I got for them, I had to use every bit. So Christine says. So I suppose your own necessities took the brunt of it. My poor Nora. And she says, yes, of course. But I was also best placed whenever Torvald gave me money for new dresses and the like. I never used more than half of it, always bought the plainest and cheapest thing. It was a blessing from heaven that everything suits me so well. So Torvald didn't notice. But many a time it weighed heavily on me. Christine, she has been living like a beggar and living in such a way as to really reduce the comforts that she had to pay off this loan, while not giving any indication to Torvald that anything was amiss by not letting his quality of life suffer at all, while her suffered tremendously. The first thing that we see her do is be generous and There's a big difference between being a spendthrift and being generous. Of course. The porter comes in with a Christmas tree and she asks, how much? And he says, half a crown. And she gives him a full crone and tells him to keep the change. That's generosity. Then when Helmer comes in, when. Sorry, I keep going back and forth because he's Helmer in the. 44:19 Wes: It's fine. Yeah. 44:20 Erin: In the script. 44:21 Wes: And she's Mrs. Helmer. 44:23 Erin: Sorry, she's Mrs. Helmer. That's right. We have several words for her relationship to money that he gives us, which is that she fritters things and that she's extravagant. These are two words. We have spending bird. But when he's. When he's talking about her spending, he calls it frittering and he calls it extravagance. Whereas when she talks about spending, she says, letting ourselves go, Torvald, surely we must be able to let ourselves go a little this year. After all, this is the first Christmas we don't need to save. So there's this implicit idea of freedom, openness. We can relax now. We can let things go a little bit. We don't have to be so restricted. Instantly, he turns that into frittering and extravagance. I think that's key because I think this has to do with Nora's generosity of spirit, her freedom, her sense of wanting to have freedom versus what Torvald is all about, which is control and trying to reign her in constantly. She's not allowed to be herself, to follow her own light at all. She has to react to him. She has to. You know, he has to constantly tell her she's always doing something wrong, you know, and he is. He's constantly punishing her in these little tiny ways. And so, yeah, I do think it's. I mean, I think abuse is such a. You know, it's not a word I want to say because it's overused, but I do think it's abusive. 45:49 Wes: Yeah. I think it's interesting, these kind of names that he has for her, because a squirrel, right, is actually stores up the nuts, right? It doesn't just eat the macaroons. 46:02 Erin: Yes. 46:03 Wes: It takes them somewhere and stores them. But squirrels also, you might think of a squirrel as a sort of scavenger. So, Right. She's kind of rummaging around, picking up bits and pieces. So you get the image that she's a scavenger in her own home. And that's when he counts out the money to her. That's one example. She's dependent on what she can get from him. So it highlights her lack of independence, as does, of course, the bird names. Right. So she's like a bird, like a caged bird, but also she's a skylark chirruping for him. She's there to be pretty, she's there to be an ornament. She's there to not be free and fly and spread her wings. Right. Ultimately, the end, he's gonna think of her as wounded and he's gonna want to spread his wings over her. I can protect you. Right. But on the other hand, she's a quote unquote spending bird, which I think you're right. I don't think we can take that seriously. Based on what the evidence that we get in the play. What we do see is that in a way, her desire to spend, it's just normal housekeeping stuff, but it's also a bet on the future. You could think of it as investment. And that's the way you can look at the trip that she takes him on. You can see it as something associated with love. And it's an investment in future possibility. I have to take out this loan to take Torvald on a trip so that he will not die, so that he will get better, so that he can be cured. You can call that extravagance if you want. And if you are initially skeptical like me and you don't think it's weird that people take one year vacations to get cured, then that's the attitude you might have, that it's merely extravagance, but if it's necessary, then it's an investment and it can reap rewards. He doesn't have that same attitude towards the future. I just wanted to highlight that because the investment that she's made at an unconscious level is in finding out if he's the kind of person that he pretends to be. Right. He says at various points he would sacrifice everything for her. That if anything bad happened, he would take it all upon himself and she's going to prove him wrong. She sets in motion the events that will prove him wrong and show him not to be that actual person. I think that's in the end what the loan is about. But we better, we better stop part one here and then continue in our next part. 48:34 Erin: Okay, thank you. 48:35 Wes: All right, thank you 48:40 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”; Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Picnic at Hanging Rock. We just got done talking about the dangers of algebra and I don't need any convincing there. And I hinted at this in part one. I just want to talk about Australia itself and its status as a curious—what is it—cipher, which I think the film is working with. Maybe Hanging Rock itself is kind of a stand in for all of Australia, but I just, you know, I was reflecting on the fact that Australia is a kind of a nowhere. Its name is from the Latin Terra australis incognita, so unknown southern land. So I guess its southern ness is the thing that remains in the name of the place, but it's otherwise sort of unlocatable. It's of the west, and that it was colonized by the west, and yet it is not Western. It's not really east either. You know, it's sort of like too far east to be east. It's in the Southern hemisphere. So we have this topsy turvy quality to a Western sensibility in which February 14 is the height of summer. In terms of its landscape, you know, it's sort of tropical, but not really, and only on the edges. It has the outback, the bush, this arid landscape, which at the same time can't really be mapped onto the more famed landscapes in the Western imagination that are desert, like the Sahara or, you know, it has a sort of frontier quality, but it's not as recognizable or legible to us as, say, the American frontier, the American West. And it has this history of colonization, but it's as a penal colony. So that's kind of a whole other thing. Right? So we can say that, you know, this film has attracted a lot of comparisons to something like Passage to India, which in my mind has a far more legible colonial statement, in a way. Or it's far more. Right. Like we think of India, when we think of places that were colonized by England, we think of that place as being a place which has its own long culture, its own architecture, its own sense of itself, and this extremely lush, verdant, tropical place. And then we think of the British coming in, right, and trying to laminate on top of that some sort of something, you know, whereas. Whereas Australia just doesn't have, you know, it has obviously the aboriginal peoples, of course, but in the Western imagination, that there isn't that kind of easy parallel. We don't Think of Australia, you know, it's not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of any number of these categorizations that we have in the west of understanding either the parts of the world which are other from the west or the parts of the world on which the west has left its mark. And I think that the fact that Australia kind of stands outside of a sort of easy narrative really makes it this ideal place for a story like this, which I'm. Which I'm suggesting is a sort of anti. Mystery or which is deconstructing the mystery story. Because in the way. In a way that's kind of Australia's whole bag. That's Australia's whole thing. It's this thing that. That can't be classified, that can't be understood, that there is no language to encapsulate. And so what happens on Hanging Rock is kind of like, you know, that mystery, that central plot point, is kind of like Australia itself. Which then leads me to think about the kind of people who come to Australia and therefore the kind of people who end up teaching at a school like Appleyard College. Because of course, on the one hand the girls are these fascinating creatures because their teenage girls are kind of nuts and they're, you know, a lot of these girls are beautiful and they're wealthy and they're connected to nature and they're all, you know, at the bloom of youth and all that. But of course, in all of the. In every instance that is about a repressive school, of course, the most fascinating people are the teachers that are there because the teachers are in this bizarre position of being probably at best middle class and being thrust into this situation in which they have to provide for themselves by ministering to these girls who are very shortly going to entirely leapfrog over them. And yet they have control over these upper class girls in the environment of the school. And so, and, and that I think is complicated. Or further. Yeah, further complicated. That already fascinating relationship with this idea of Australia. Like, why are these women here? You know, like in England, of course they're there because they're English and they need a job, right. But in Australia it's like, how did you get here? What's your. Greta McCraw is Scottish, you know, and there's that shade of. Because it's a penal colony, you know, and Australians have embraced this largely. But, you know, there's that hint of, you know, even if you were born here and you didn't immigrate here, perhaps your family has this sort of Sordid history. What's your background? Why? How did you end up here? I don't know all of that to say, like the French teacher is a fascinating figure to me. McCraw is a fascinating figure, less so because she just seems to be very sour faced and very, you know, exactly the kind of person we would associate with the school. And Appleyard, too, is a fascinating figure. 5:50 Wes: I think it's a forbidding and in many ways alien environment. Don't forget the kangaroos, Right? And the koala bears and the. 5:58 Erin: Yeah, yeah, there's that koala in one species. 6:00 Wes: Lots of species we don't have. 6:02 Erin: Yes, yes, many unique, endemic. Yeah, but species that are not found anywhere else. 6:08 Wes: Right, right. We can go out west in the United States and have an experience in quite an alien landscape. But Australia takes it to a different level in some ways and it's more forbidding and more harsh and more remote. And so in that way, I think you're also pointing to more mysterious. So. Yeah. I think one wonders, given the history of it being a penal colony and people being exiled to this place, why have these girls been exiled to boarding school? Many of them are English. Right. Are they all English or. I mean, as upper class or are there any upper class Australian girls at that school? 6:45 Erin: I think Miranda. Yeah, I think Miranda. 6:48 Wes: Oh, she's, she is Australian, of course. Right? 6:50 Erin: Yes. And she, she has familiarity with the bush. 6:54 Wes: Okay, Right. 6:55 Erin: It's noted that she would probably survive. 6:58 Wes: So maybe I'm wrong. Are any of the girls English? Maybe they're all Australian. 7:01 Erin: Well, I think, I think what, what does it mean to be English in this circumstance? Right. You know, we have these colonial families, perhaps, perhaps largely military families, perhaps not. I'm not sure. My impression is in India they were largely either associated with the military or with the East India Company. In Australia, I don't know. But, you know, if you end up moving there and then raise a family there and then your kids are born there, are they Australian? You know, but there's that funny line. 7:28 Wes: I think I should backtrack here. I mean, is anyone really sending their English daughter to an Australian boarding school? I. Halfway around the world? 7:36 Erin: Perhaps not. I mean, one of the plot points, for instance, in A Little Princess, the Burnett novel that I mentioned, and others, is that the children of colonial parents in India were sent to England to boarding school because of the climate, which was thought to be not good for children. So many were separated from their parents, but in the, in the reverse direction when it comes to India, at least. And you would Think depending on what part of Australia they were in with the anxiety over malaria and various other things. I mean, maybe that's not a problem in Australia, but one could imagine, you know, if they thought heat would make you crazy or something like that, if you were a kid, then they would want to send you to a climate like England, rather send you out of Australia. And of course, England's the only place, so. Yeah. I don't know. 8:20 Wes: We get the sense though that Michael is English. He's the nephew of a colonial governor. 8:24 Erin: Yes. He's only been there for a few weeks, I think it said. Yeah. 8:28 Wes: And then he's leaving at the end. 8:29 Erin: Yeah. I love the scene with the party and the string quartet in the middle of the man made lakes in the middle of the bush. It's like, you know, talk about denial. There's just no, there's no beating that level of denial. It's really just classic English behavior. 8:50 Wes: Well, again, it's this attempt to use the natural landscape as a form of leisure. Right. Just like the string quartet, it belongs among those things. And that's what the picnic is about as well. Except that there are dangers. Classical music is a little less dangerous than going on a picnic at hanging rock. 9:11 Erin: That's right. Not to make too fine a point of this, then we can abandon the teachers if we wish. But I'm thinking about what you said with Ms. McCraw and this idea about algebra. I wondered too, what kind of education these girls are getting. Insofar as Sarah knows more than Mrs. Appleyard about poetry. It doesn't seem to be a good one. Insofar as they have that sort of really stupid looking calisthenics class that they're doing at the end or towards the end of the film. You know, I was thinking about the difference between Ms. McCraw and Mademoiselle de Poitiers in terms of the difference in the nature of instruction. So the French teacher's appeal seems to be that she speaks French and therefore she's just going to speak French to the right one. One doesn't need any kind of special training if one is French and just gets transported to an English school. Right. So something maybe about the naturalism of that or the sort of lack of instruction inherent in that instruction, which isn't to say that the Australian girls aren't being instructed properly or don't have to exert themselves to learn French. But the difference between the difference in those two intelligences and why those two particular ones end up on this trip together, why the One with a more natural intelligence doesn't end up being spirited away. It's just. It's a source of, I think, endless fascination for me. You have these two completely opposite women. I think I like Ms. McCraw quite a bit, and I love that actress. She has a great, intelligent face and 10:36 Wes: she has, you know, some of the best lines, I think. 10:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 10:40 Wes: But, yeah, it's a great contrast in characters. I think in both cases, though, we can wonder. I described the girls as exiled, not from England, but if you're being sent off to boarding school, you know, it is the thing to do. Right. And it's not necessarily a punishment, but one could ask, if it is like being sent to a penal colony, what did you do wrong? 10:59 Erin: Yes. 11:00 Wes: And then for the teachers, the question becomes even more relevant. Why would you leave France and go to Australia? Unless, you know, you really got yourself into some trouble. 11:10 Erin: Yes. Or some tragedy befell your family. Yeah, yeah. 11:14 Wes: And trouble. Trouble could mean a pregnancy that you gave up for adoption at that time. Trouble could mean a lot of things. But so. And Lumley. Yeah, I should have. Is Lumley English or Australian? 11:26 Erin: I think she's Australian. 11:27 Wes: I can't remember. McCraw, you said, is Scottish. Yeah. 11:30 Erin: Yes. 11:31 Wes: So at least in the case of McCraw and de Poitiers, what happened to them that, you know, had them end up at this school in Australia. Yeah. It's the kind of thing where you can, you know, if you got yourself into enough trouble and you're not going to do what Sarah did, what do you do instead? You just go halfway around the world and start over. That kind of feeling. Yes, that kind of thing. So you do might be something, but 11:54 Erin: without the hope, without the hopefulness of going to America. You know, like, this is part of the difference, too. You know, I think there's the narrative about America. You can go there and you can have a fresh start and everything's going to be okay. The narrative about Australia is like, you go there because you're guilty, and then what, you punish them? 12:15 Wes: Manifest destiny. 12:17 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. 12:19 Wes: Foster's destiny. 12:20 Erin: Right. I mean, it's a lovely place, and I would love to go. And I just mean that there's no narrative about it that has to do with pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps or other obnoxious expressions. 12:31 Wes: So, yeah, I don't know if there's a. You know, the idea of a pioneer spirit, of course, plays a big role in the American psyche. 12:38 Erin: Yeah. There's the bushranger and the adventurer yeah, 12:41 Wes: but I don't know. It doesn't seem to mean the same thing in Australia. 12:47 Erin: That's right. 12:47 Wes: And that's why I mentioned Manifest Destiny. It doesn't. 12:49 Erin: Yes, exactly. 12:50 Wes: Yeah. What else do we want to talk about? I mean, there's Miranda's ineffable character or. I don't know how you would describe it. Dreamy and inscrutable maybe is a word I would use. 13:02 Erin: Yes. And her foreknowledge, or her. She seems connected to. I mean, of course, what she says about how she knows she's not gonna be here much longer could be related to other circumstances. In fact, she's this. In the book, the three that disappear are all senior girls. So, in fact, she's about to graduate. That's an element of it as well. 13:23 Wes: I mean, the film starts right, we have a girl's. There's credits. And as credits roll, a girl's voice. What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream. And that kind of sense of the unreal is pervasive. And Miranda, in a way, strongly exudes that. So I think we start out in Miranda's room. And there's flute music. And Miranda waking up looking very angelic. And having that kind of touched quality about her. It's a kind of self confidence, I suppose, that she exudes home with herself. Which I think you could. Could associate with class in a certain way. But it's not like adolescent youthful insecurity. She doesn't give that off. So maybe it's kind of a version of femininity which is fully at home with itself or something like that. As opposed to some more anxious form. And then I think Sarah looks back from a window, smiling at Miranda. There's a very loving relationship between them that one might wonder. You know, there's a homosexual element. Miranda is reading from Sarah's Valentine's card. Meet me love when day is ending. And at that point, actually, Miranda has just washed her face, but not dried her face, which I thought was quite odd. She has, like, beads of water hanging off her face. And reading that poem. 14:43 Erin: Probably because of the heat. 14:44 Wes: No, I think. You know, there's another scene where another girl has washed her face and dried herself normally. And then Miranda doesn't just leaves the water there. 14:51 Erin: But maybe Miranda's smarter about the heat because she's from the bush. 14:54 Wes: Yeah, maybe you're idealizing Miranda just like everyone else. I'm just kidding. 15:02 Erin: I think there's something to that. 15:03 Wes: Meet me love when day is ending with the Beads of water cooling your angelic Botticelli face. And then you get a shift to another scene where another girl's reading from another girl's card. I love thee for thy highborn grace. Quoting a real poem there. As opposed to one that's been written by one of the girls. Then you have Edith counting, kind of gluttonously counting all the Valentine's cards that she's gotten. 15:28 Erin: Even Edith has many admirers. 15:30 Wes: Maybe it's worth kind of going over the different cast of characters here. Because there's Sarah, who I think we've sufficiently described. And then Miranda. And then we have Irma. Right? 15:41 Erin: Yes, the dark haired girl. 15:43 Wes: At a certain point when they're on the rock. Edith wants to comment on the fact that Sarah's been writing love poetry in the dunny in the bathroom. And Miranda will say, she's an orphan. She's an orphan. And Irma compares her to a deer that she adopted that didn't live. So Edith says, Blanche said Sarah writes poetry in the dunny. She found one there on the floor. All about Miranda. Miranda, she's an orphan. Then Irma said, sarah reminds me of a little deer Papa brought home once. I looked after it, but it died. Mama always said it was doomed. Edith says, doomed? What does that mean, Irma? Doomed to die, of course. And then Edith says, I think I must be doomed. I don't feel well at all. She's the one who's not doomed. 16:32 Erin: Yeah. Anyway, anyone could tell she's the least doomed person on the expedition. Nothing could kill Edith. 16:42 Wes: And then there's Marian, who says, I wish you would all stop talking for once. And Marian has some great speeches earlier on about people being ants. 16:51 Erin: Yes, she's the little Miss McCraw. She's the class. 16:56 Wes: Right? Exactly. Whatever can those people be doing down there? Like a lot of ants. Surprising the number of human beings are without purpose. Although it is probably they're performing some function unknown to themselves. 17:08 Erin: Love that one. 17:09 Wes: And then Miranda says, everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place. And by which she meant our lives are going to end at the right time and place. The contrast that comes out here is the superciliousness of that kind of speech by Marian. But she's doing it from this kind of third person perspective. Aren't we all kind of like ants and purposeless in comparison to the forces of nature and the scale of things and all of that. And then Irma's relationship to Sarah, instead of being very compassionate, let's say like Miranda, even though there seems to be an element of condescension there for Irma, it is quite condescending and suggests. Right. Foretells the fact that Sarah is in fact doomed like the deer. So Miranda, I think is. She's a very special case among the girls. I guess I want to point out with her character and the way she relates to Sarah and her comfort with herself and the way in which she can become this sort of Pied Piper, I think, become this sort of idealized image of femininity, maybe. 18:17 Erin: Yes. 18:18 Wes: That can lead people to their ruin. 18:21 Erin: In the book, it's clearer. But Irma is supposed to be the beautiful one in the book. And I mean, much is made of Miranda's beauty as well, but she's supposed to be the sort of traditional, not classically, but traditionally beautiful one. And she's, she's an heiress. I think the class distinction is what's preserved in her speeches about Sarah there that you're pointing to. You know, Sarah's someone to be pitied. That has as much relation to us as a deer to the, you know, it's human adoptive parents who basically can't do anything to help. You know, there's no helping the poor. Right. The poor are poor. And that's, that's the end of it. The Marian speech, you know, that she has that curious disconnect, you know, whatever can those people be doing down there? Well, those are the people they were just with. Those are their schoolmates. There's a curious lack of recognition and as you suggest, is speaking from the third person. And I think this is where we can say, okay, Appleyard has, has permitted them to go beyond the yard into the, you know, the rock as representative of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Right. And they have at this point ascended to some sort of knowledge. And they have a wisdom now which makes where they came from somewhat unrecognizable. And of course, this is part of what is so antagonizing about Irma when she returns. And she has that fantastic scarlet get up that she wears before she leaves because she's crossed over now. She has big girl knowledge now. She has grown up knowledge. She's been through an experience. And of course that can be just simply the result of having been through a near death experience and to come out the other side. Or it could be the result of what happened to her on the rock, 20:02 Wes: which was, remember, she's quite intact. Quite intact. 20:06 Erin: Yes, yes, says the doctor repeatedly. 20:10 Wes: Yes, about her and Edith. And Edith, that's the Important thing. 20:15 Erin: Right. Yeah. And yet she's become a woman somehow. 20:20 Wes: But of course. Exactly. You know, as you point out, not. 20:22 Erin: Yeah. So it's as though all of these angry Eves. Children of Eve. Right. Still haven't eaten of the fruit and are quite upset about the fact that the one who has isn't sharing their knowledge with them. That seems to be the chief problem there. But I think Miranda. Miranda came into the picture already having eaten something thing. Right. And I think. I think that's the difference. So I think this is extremely common and related. You know, Miranda is the it girl there are in. Among teenage girls. And it doesn't necessarily have to be sexual or whatever, but simply this homosocial environment, which maybe exacerbates this. But this is the. The girl crush, specifically on the older girl who seems to know things. Everything that you don't know when you're just a freshman and she's a senior and, you know, you. If you're lucky, she's not a mean girl at the same time. No, not at all. Not at all. No. It's a very, very different thing. It's a very different thing that. 21:21 Wes: Yeah. 21:21 Erin: Very rarely are the mean girls, which is to say the popular girls, deserving of that kind of. That kind of status based on anything having to do with looks or intelligence or anything. They're usually like just the terrors of the school. And that's how they get all their power. But. But on an individual. But I mean, I remember being a freshman and having senior girls that I was that in. In the theater productions that I did who, you know, when they would give me attention, it was like, oh, my gosh, it was the most, you know, incredible thing to be given attention by these girls who were beautiful, mature, knew everything were kind to me. And, you know, I think this is. This is like a universal thing with. I don't know about the way things work with boys, but I'm sure there's probably a parallel to this. Yeah. And Miranda seems somehow to be the one that everyone in the school agrees is the top banana. 22:16 Wes: Is there anything to say about why they keep going? This is the thing that freaks Edith out so much. Right. So that they've been trekking on, and they kind of, at a certain point seem like they're walking in a kind of funk, in a kind of daze because they're so tired and hot and they lie down on the rocks looking very tired. You know, we get shots of the kind of peaks of the rock against the sky, and. And then there's a little. There's a little brief cut actually to McCraw. And the other girl's lying at the bottom of the rock. And McCraw looks up, like, what's going on up there? And then looks back down into her. Her geometry book. And then after that shot, we see top down, the girls lying on a kind of called a courtyard or a clearing, like a rock clearing. And that shot is through this very hot air and they're lying down and, you know, it's a kind of distant shot from up high. And then Miranda wakes up and then Marian and then Irma. And it's. Right. Without being alerted by Miranda. It's not like anyone wakes anyone else up. They just sort of wake up simultaneously and get up and Edith is complaining, when are we going home? And then Miranda goes off into a kind of a crag or crevice and the others follow her and they don't respond to Edith. Then they don't look back. And that's when Edith screams and runs down. So, yeah, what do we say there about what has happened psychologically or symbolically? I mean, what is that? 23:41 Erin: Much is made of the fact that Edith isn't looking at the rocks. She keeps looking at her feet. I might be one of them. You know, there's people who can't be hypnotized or something. 23:50 Wes: Well, it's like she counts the Valentine's cards, right? Look how many I got. She doesn't get lost in the poetry, reading them some love poem another girl's written for her. And it's just more about quantity. 24:03 Erin: Exactly. 24:03 Wes: I would be very much like Edith. Look at this stack of, you know, Valentine's girl. 24:14 Erin: She promises not to complain, but then she does. And then she says the thing about it being nasty here, which, you know, there seems to be an environment which it's not so different from where they just were with the other girls, but different enough in terms of the feel of the place, the atmosphere, that she finds it to be extremely nasty. And she never takes off her shoes, which is important, so she stays protected somehow from, you know, so her sole insulates her. 24:42 Wes: Not in touch with the rock. 24:44 Erin: That's right. She can't give herself over to the experience. Everything is about her discomfort, her this or that. She seems to be a complainer and she does not let go in the way the other girls are capable of doing. 24:56 Wes: Yeah, but what's going on with the other girls, I think was my question. 25:00 Erin: That's the million dollar question. 25:01 Wes: It might be an unanswerable. 25:03 Erin: Yeah, I Mean, have you ever been to a place like this before? I have an experience at a place like this. It was at Devil's Tower. Tower. Have you ever been to a place that was overwhelmingly beautiful in this? I mean, there are. There are places that are overwhelmingly beautiful. What happened at Devil's Tower was extremely unusual. And I think it's the closest parallel I can make to Hanging Rock, which is, nothing happened there. I don't mean to make that sound more, you know, like, oh, yes, what happened to me? At Devil's Tower. 25:35 Wes: Devil's Tower. Discovered two days later. 25:37 Erin: Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Ridiculous. 25:40 Wes: Englishman. 25:41 Erin: I'm putting this in a stupid way. No, you know what I mean. Or. Or you don't, and I'll explain it. So you go up there. If people don't know if they've ever seen Close Encounters. That's the rock formation from Close Encounters. I think it is the one that's the one with Richard Dreyfuss and his mashed potatoes, right? Yeah. So it's that, and it's enormous. You have no idea how enormous it is until you go up there. To walk all the way around it. There's a trail to walk all the way around it is like, over a mile. It's very much like Hanging Rock. It has this long history of people engaging with it. It has, I think, in the Kiowa tradition, a sort of mythology about it, about how it was formed with this bear with the claws. Anyway, it's a sacred site, and it is the spookiest place, one of the spookiest places I've ever been. I was there in broad daylight. The woods surrounding it and the rock itself, it's indescribable. And there is a sound, a very specific sound, which is. Which I've only ever heard in Picnic at Hanging Rock. It's the only other place I have heard a sound like this. And I have footage. I have video footage from Devil's Tower. You could hear this sound. It's like the sound of the wind going through the rock or on the flutes of the rock. It's an entirely different kind of rock than Hanging Rock, which I would imagine would create the sound because of the air holes that are probably created by the nature of the str. Of the structure. Devil's Tower is a completely different kind of rock. So I don't know why the sound was there as well, but it was an extremely loud, like, ringing in your ears kind of sound. It was extremely spooky. You just got this sense that you were not alone there, not just because of the Other people that were there, right? Yes. And I was very taken by it. 27:22 Wes: Now, let me ask you a question. What did you do with your mashed potatoes that night? 27:26 Erin: I did. I've never played with my mashed potatoes. Thank you. I'm very civilized. Didn't leave my senses or anything like that. But I. I kept getting goosebumps all over my body. I kept getting. I was very, very affected by it. It was a strange thing. I think that what these girls are experiencing is not unlike a very extreme version of whatever happened to me at Devil's Tower in terms of just this bodily. You have a bodily response to these types of environments. And I think it's this curious case of an environment in which one feels the presence of people, even where, you know, there's this curious quality of some of these rock formations in the west. And I'd imagine this is similar where they look like they're man made, but they're not. They're natural. And so one has this sense that it's an almost like an abandoned castle or an abandoned fortification or something, but it isn't. And that trick, too, is extremely hypnotic somehow. I don't know. This has nothing to do with anything. My personal experience is not an answer to your question. I'm sorry. 28:30 Wes: No, this is good. Can we point to any other similar stories where the hypnotic quality of nature leads them to play with their mashed potatoes, so to speak? Sorry. Leads them to their demise. Leads them to their destruction. 28:44 Erin: Not to destruction, but there's a moment which is very evocative for me in a movie which is also based on a novel called Enchanted April, in which these English women escape this particularly rainy spring by going on a trip to Italy. And there are scenes in that film and in the novel on which it's based in which the women are laying on the rocks on the coastline of Italy. And at one point, one of them is lying so still that a lizard. You know, it's a very similar scene where a lizard kind of comes in, she's actually awake, she's aware of it, and she's just lying there, but she doesn't react to the lizard kind of crawling over her and then crawling away. It's such a peaceful moment, you know, they've all gotten their groove back in one way or another, and they're at one with nature, you know. So there's that, which I think is a trope that I've seen more times than that, but that's the one that I could think of because that's a film I love. And that's another experience that I think is extremely common. I don't. I don't think the Devil's Tower experience is extremely common because those places aren't so extremely common. That's. You know. 29:50 Wes: Yeah. I don't think I've had that experience. I don't think I've. 29:53 Erin: The Devil's Tower or just the feeling at one with nature while you're lying on the rock. 29:57 Wes: I've had the feeling at one with nature experience on a rare occasion. 30:01 Erin: Oh, you've talked about that before when we did the Wordsworth. 30:04 Wes: Oh, did I? After taking a hike. 30:05 Erin: Mm. 30:06 Wes: I was in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yeah. After climbing. Doing a lot of climbing. Being very, very out of shape, being exhausted, but then reaching a lookout point right at sunset and sitting down and being very in the zone. But. Yeah. No. So. Well, getting to the point where I have a. Maybe I'm hypnotized to the point where I want to keep going. Enter into the fugue, whatever fugue state those girls are in. To the point where they could just take the stairway to heaven. 30:34 Erin: That's it. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I've been in that a few. A few times. 30:41 Wes: It's like, girl, we gotta get. I'm determined to do this whole hike. We're gonna go to the top. This would be a good Chevy Chase vacation moment. Going all the way up. You know, scene where they're all dying of heatstroke. 31:01 Erin: Well, so what do we make? I mean, we haven't yet addressed, really, Michael or. 31:06 Wes: Yeah. What's his deal? 31:07 Erin: What's his deal? Yeah, yeah. So we have this sort of parallel homosocial. You know, Michael and his buddy Albert, who watch girls cross creeks and drink from the same bottle of beer, you know. So you have a sort of parallel there. 31:23 Wes: Yeah. And you wonder, in a way, if it's a bit of a curse that they've cast on the. On the girls. Right. The idea that they've. That they might have been involved in some malfeasance is not. The film doesn't seem to entertain it very seriously, at least at length. You know, we do get Albert lusting after the girls, and then he'll say something to which Michael objects, which is that she'd have a decent pair of legs. He's talking about Miranda all the way up to her bum. Michael says, I'd rather you didn't say crude things like that, Albert. 31:58 Erin: Shocking. Shocking. I say shocking. 32:01 Wes: And Albert says, I say the crude things. You just think them. So there's saying them out Loud. There's thinking them and then there's doing. There's acting on them. And as we know, people can feel guilty about just thinking them without even acting on them and think people can even have the irrational idea that their thoughts maybe are like deeds, that their thoughts might actually harm people. And so if we take that idea seriously, we can think of this concupiscence of these boys as cursing or harming the girls. If we look at it the way someone with OCD might look at it, or someone with omnipotence of thought might think about this, might wonder if it's this kind of desire which wrecks things, so that the feminine, in a way, is set up to elicit this kind of desire, but in one way or another is destroyed by it. 32:57 Erin: What do we take then, of the fact that the movie, I think, toys with and then very swiftly abandons the possibility that Michael and Irma will have a relationship? Right. Am I making that up? Yeah, I think that's right, because he saved her. So they both had this experience, and now perhaps they're going to be together. 33:20 Wes: That would be a nice natural development. And he's looking kind of fondly at her as she's lying in bed, right? 33:27 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Crucial to this development is the lack of conversation between them at all. So. 33:32 Wes: Yeah. 33:34 Erin: Then they talk and realize other than this one terrible thing that happened, they have nothing in common. 33:40 Wes: We don't. Yeah. And we don't really know exactly why Michael is so intent on finding the girls. You know, it almost is as if he feels personally responsible for what's happened to them. 33:52 Erin: I don't mean this to sound like quite as much of a condemnation as it will, but there's a great deal of paternalism there. You know, he was on the rock that day, too, and therefore what happened to them was somehow his fault, even if it wasn't his fault. I think that the film plays really cleverly with the. You know, we see his innocence at the same time, and yet we see the guilt that he carries, which looks like guilt over what's happened to them at first. But there's. Yes, there's this paternalism that something happened on his watch. He just happened to be there, and yet it's his responsibility, which I think is indicative of the kind of attitude of the colonial. 34:30 Wes: Okay. If it's colonial, he goes native in a way, because he. 34:34 Erin: Yes. 34:35 Wes: He falls subject to the same spell and ends up in the same spot, in a way, as the rest of the girls, which is he's dying on the rock. And it's only because Albert comes and gets him that he's saved. 34:47 Erin: Right. 34:47 Wes: You know, he's shaking and he's mute. Right. He can't even tell Albert that he's found Irma. He just has to, you know, hand off the piece of the dress as he's being taken away. So he's in a really bad state. But you can see how his. His fascination with Miranda, in a way, is of a piece with the fascination of the other girls. And he's been kind of led up the rock by the Pied Piper as well. And then you can contrast that fascination. So there's a hybrid quality to his interest in a way. Right. He's an investigator and he's more successful than Sergeant Bumpher. But he also has this other fascination which motivates him, which is precisely what Sergeant Bumpher doesn't have. Bumphur seems perplexed and a bit put off. We never quite, you know, we never fully understand what's going on with him and why, you know, is he just incompetent or what's going on that. But there seems to be a way in which this whole thing. And maybe it's the possibility of a sex crime, basically that's what's. Which interferes with Bumpher's ability to do his job because it's distasteful. Anything sexual is too much to take. But he. He doesn't have enough motivation to get the job done. And he's even right to the point where after Irma is found, there's a bit of an uprising among people in the town. Like this boy found her and you weren't able to. And what are you doing anyway? I was trying to speak to. Not to get us on the Bumpher, the sergeant, necessarily, but just speaking to Michael's complicated motivations. 36:23 Erin: Yes. Yeah, I think they're both. Bumpher and Michael are either attracted to or repelled by forces which they themselves can't name or acknowledge, but which they feel are there. 36:34 Wes: Right. 36:34 Erin: So the. The. The sexual implication for Bumpher is the. The fate worse than death. The thing that he does not want to be sort of infected by or he doesn't even want to imagine, because that. That seems to be the worst thing that this society can think of. You know, I like what you're talking about in terms of the idea of his having infected them with his thoughts. That seems to be crucial. Like there's a guilt element which is crucial here, and then also a paternalism at the same time, and the idea that he is responsible somehow for what's happened to them and for their protection, so that he's in a sort of loop of colonial paternal responsibility, which Bumpher can't sort of rouse himself to feel on behalf of these women because he was not personally taken under their spell or something, and therefore can stand a bit apart from it. But, yeah, the spell of the girls seems to be an extension of whatever was the spell they were under that caused the disappearance in the first place. And maybe Bumpher is more like an Edith and Michael is more like, you know, one of the girls. But it does seem to be, you know, a Rorschach test for the people in the town. Their response to this, because it is so fuzzy, so utterly incomprehensible. 37:44 Wes: There's the suggestion that the uptightness and the aversion to sexuality is what makes the girls unfindable and what leads to their ruin. Right. One of the things that. So at that T where Michael's saying, you know, young ladies wouldn't be allowed to go walking in the forest like that, the last line in that scene is the sergeant saying, as the girls were jumping the creek, what were you thinking of? 38:08 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 38:09 Wes: That's the closest we get to him suggesting to Michael that he had had some illicit desires that he might have acted on. There's a class element there as well. Right. We might see the sergeant's reluctance having to do with the fact that he is not going to accuse a person of this standing, of committing a crime like this, maybe. 38:32 Erin: Right. 38:32 Wes: But at the very least, there's this aversion to the potentially sexual component. And we find out, right, we hear from Edith that McCraw was just in her underwear and that Edith saw her at a certain point. And then later on, a maid will conceal from the police the fact that Irma was, what, missing her underwear or something? Missing her corset. So maybe, you know, at a thematic level, the girls are not findable because of their sexuality, let's say. 39:04 Erin: Yeah. 39:05 Wes: And they're lost because of. 39:07 Erin: That's great. And it gets. At the extent to which the film kind of has it both ways, because we keep seeing these images of Miranda after she's gone, which. Which leads me to think a little bit more about this idea of photography. But we have, on the one hand this. Well, we have a sort of two pronged thing on the one hand, which is the Victorian idea of, you know, there's nothing. And maybe even a romantic idea that there's nothing more beautiful than a dead girl. Right. And we also have this idea that to kill the Girls or to get rid of the girls somehow is to, like, get rid of the temptation that they represent, the sexuality, they represent, whatever. Whatever is threatening about them in Victorian society. So that's. That's sort of on the one hand, but on the other hand, we have the fact that they are gone, the fact that there's no image, so nothing more beautiful than this image. But then the image isn't there. There are no dead bodies of these girls. So that we're denied that dead girl. Beautiful dead girl. What is it? Satisfaction, you know, the dead girl satisfaction, actually. You know. You know what I mean? We're denied the image of what's. What's happened, and therefore denied the supposed beauty that accompanies this. I hope listeners will understand I'm, you know, saying all of this in air quotes that comes from this idea of beauty cut down in its prime or. Or whatever. We're denied that image, and yet the film provides it. Right. The film keeps showing us images of Miranda and the. There's an association as well in Michael's mind with the swan, the idea that Swan might be, you know, twinned with her. So we keep seeing the swan over and over again. We do see the image in the newspaper of Miranda's face, 1900. Sort of looks almost like a sketch drawing, slightly more. More involved than a sketch drawing. Black and white, fuzzy image of Miranda's face, a photograph printed in the paper. And it makes me think of Sontag's On Photography. You know, the idea of the photographic image is the thing which is something akin to a colonizing force, you know, the desire to own the world, to capture the world in the way that a safari hunter would try to capture something of the world and mount it on one's wall to prove some kind of dominance over it, to prove that one has had these experiences and. And preserved them, or come back with proof that the experience was. Had this idea of capture and of making sense of a world which is scary and dangerous and nonsensical. This is another element of Sontag's essay, in which the camera is the protective screen between you and, you know, very often the foreign culture that you are encountering. So you protect yourself by taking the photo. You don't know what to do with yourself. You take a photo, you know, you come up against something which is foreign and strange, and rather than really looking at it, you put a lens between you and the thing. All of these complexities, I think, are inherent, very, very submerged, but inherent in this, with these images. And, you know, we see people with photographs Going to the hanging rock and trying to photograph the rock in order to understand what has happened there. Right. And so, in a way, the film is like, by virtue of being a film, is working against its own message or working against the impulses which are motivating the film's plot. Because there is something being captured there. And it's about. The whole movie is about this sort of inability to capture, the inability to pin down and to quantify and categorize and colonize the ways in which it works against that, through collage, through slow motion, various other things which are manipulations, which are, in a way, sort of hyper photography. But at the same time, they work against the singularity of the image or of easy readings of certain images. 42:47 Wes: Yeah. No, you're making me think of the imaginary in cinema. I think there's a book called the Imaginary Signifier by Christian Metz. Yeah, it's about psychoanalysis in the cinema. So just briefly, I think for Lacan, the imaginary has something to do with. He's thinking of a phase in early childhood when you see yourself in the mirror and you identify with the image and you're identifying with its cohesion physically. You know, just seeing your body and you're identifying with its efficacy. Right. Limbs that can actually do things. And we all know how toddlers delight in being able to use their bodies as they become more. Get greater mastery over their bodies, and then that becomes the way in which they develop the fantasy of their own ego being, or subjectivity and identity being something stable and cohesive. So they use this image as a way of forming an identity. So it's a kind of identification that's the imaginary as opposed to the symbolic. And the symbolic is more representative of what happens after you are inducted into the social world and are following all. You know, get to the point where you're following on society's rules. The name of the father, Lacan would say, which he sees as metaphorical castration. There's a wholeness in the imaginary which is disturbed in the symbolic realm. But I think so when you have these other girls identifying with. So they're taken with Miranda. But it's partly erotic in the broad sense. You could say it's partly about love, but it's also about identification, about wanting to be her, to become like her and to be as whole and perfect as she seems. But as you've pointed out, there's something deathlike about that wholeness and perfectness. So you can follow the imaginary image. Right. It's like, ultimately, Narcissus, that's what Narcissus is doing. Right. Being entranced with himself in the pool. In the pool. The image of himself in the pool to the point where he doesn't take care of himself and dies. So the imaginary can be something with which we identify. Can be very dangerous. It can. Or another way to put this is our ideals and aspirations or ego ideal can come at the expense of our real self. 45:16 Erin: Hmm. Sure. But then how does this work for. For Miranda? Because I think part of Miranda's appeal is that she's not like this narcissist. I think you're suggesting the other girls are like that. They're idealizing her. 45:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean she just gets to be what she is. 45:32 Erin: She just is. Right? Yeah. And she doesn't have to. She's not part of that wholeness seems to be about the fact that she isn't self obsessed. So the fact that she's the ringleader. 45:42 Wes: Yeah. She comes across. I think it's important she comes across as authentic and authentically whole. Not that anyone is of course completely. But she has a self possession to her. 45:52 Erin: She's more self actualized than the other girls. 45:54 Wes: Yeah, she's. Yeah. As much as a 18 year old. Is she 18? But no. Yeah. I'm thinking of the relationship of. And she wouldn't need to be actualized of course at all. Or she just needs to give that appearance. And of course again, we can do it with our own. We don't need another person necessarily. But we kind of do. You know, if it's not Miranda, it's celebrities or it's teachers or authority figures. People you want to be. 46:24 Erin: Yeah. You have to have an identification with someone to model adulthood. Or normal. Even just normal behavior. Never mind idealized behavior. Right. 46:33 Wes: So in other words, going up the rock is like getting excited. You know, despite the fact that you're already a doctor. About becoming an actor. I'm becoming an actor. 46:46 Erin: The world's first analrapist. 46:50 Wes: You can follow your aspirations to your total destruction. 46:55 Erin: There you go. I did not know we would get to Arrested Development here. But we normally do. Okay. Well, that was fun. I hope. 47:03 Wes: Sorry to stop halfway up the mountain, but more cautious than some people. 47:08 Erin: Yes, yes. Lest we be carried away. We won't continue talking about this film and fall deeper under its spell. That wasn't nasty here at all. I'm glad I came to paraphrase and turn Edith on her head. Thank you. 47:23 Wes: Thank you. 47:27 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

It’s Valentine’s Day in the state of Victoria, Australia in the year 1900. A group from a local girls’ school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot but only the first act of Peter Weir’s 1975 film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters’ struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock. Yet, sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it’s an anti-mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself—its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin discuss “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”; Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. It's Valentine's Day in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the year 1900. A group from a local girls school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot, but only the first act of Peter Weir's 1975 film based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock. Yet sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it's an anti mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself, its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language. Today we're discussing Picnic at Hanging Rock. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I heard that when this film came out, it did pretty well on college campuses. But when I was a master's student at the University of Florida, I discovered that not all college students were enamored by the film. And there was a story that one of my professors told that the students at a screening of this famously rioted and threw furniture at the screen and it was covered in the campus newspaper that they were so upset, I guess, that the film had no resolution. Spoiler alert. That it had no resolution and they were so hoodwinked and maybe possibly drunk, I don't know. So I wondered if you had seen the film before. I think you were unsure if you had, and whether or not you ended up throwing any furniture or what your reaction was. 2:27 Wes: Yeah, no, it turns out I haven't seen the film. I knew of the film, of course, but I had not, it turns out, seen it. I didn't do a lot of research, but I knew going in that it was going to be. I knew the plot and I knew it was going to be unresolved. It would be interesting to have just gone into it completely fresh and to see if it would have Been disappointing under those circumstances, but no. Yeah, it didn't occur to me to be disappointed with the lack of resolution in the ending. And overall, I suppose the film has a kind of dreamy, surreal quality that I guess there's a few hints that there might be some sort of explanation as to what happened. So, for instance, the fact that Michael follows the girls, that there is a bit of suspicion cast upon him, but it's quite subtle and passing and not much is made of that. So I don't think the film builds up a lot of suspense, actually, about the mystery. 3:28 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. I have the Criterion set, and a while ago I watched the documentary in which Peter Weir said that he was trying to prepare the viewers for the fact that there would be no resolution to the mystery through the tone and other clues. So, yeah, so it is. It is surprising. But this is a film that I. I saw when I was probably a little bit younger than the age of the girls in the film. So when I heard that, I was so shocked, that story. Because by that time, this had long been one of my favorite films. So I was surprised that anybody would go looking for meaning from this particular story or that kind of meaning. 4:06 Wes: How old were you when you first saw it? 4:08 Erin: I was probably 14 or 15. 4:10 Wes: Okay. 4:11 Erin: Yeah. This is one of my mom's favorite films. So she introduced it to me at the right time. Age that I was. It was like the perfect age, you know, the perfect girls, boarding school kind of age, to see this film for the first time and be really affected by it. But, yeah, to this day, it's one of my favorites. And I think it's possibly the best Australian film. I haven't seen every Australian film, but I think there's something here actually to do with the nature of Australia itself, which we might talk about. 4:36 Wes: All those poisonous snakes, all the things 4:38 Erin: that want to kill you. Yeah. But did you enjoy it? I'm just, you know, I'm curious about your reaction in a more general. 4:45 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed it. I did watch it twice. So I guess the routine now is to watch it twice so that I'm not trying to take notes during the first viewing, which can interfere with the enjoyment. But I guess because I'm thinking about recording on it, I'm not as attuned to how much I like it or don't like it. I mean, I can't say it's no Mission Impossible. It's not like Tom Cruise is doing amazing stunts and there's things exploding. 5:14 Erin: Well, it's Very. It's a very. 5:15 Wes: Yes, it's an artsy movie. So. So in other words. Yeah. I'm not equipped to the kind of an. Maybe. Maybe this way to put it. I'm so. I've been so bludgeoned by popcorn movies that I'm not as sensitive to what's going on when I'm. 5:34 Erin: That's funny. 5:34 Wes: Looking at arts here movies. And I. I can appreciate them aesthetically, but. So I appreciate it. And in fact, I think the second watching, when I was taking notes, trying to look very carefully at what was going on, in a way, strangely enough, that was more gratifying that I watched them days apart and I didn't expect to have the second time be more pleasurable because then I knew it was gonna happen. I done. 6:01 Erin: Well, for me, it's. I had never really thought so deeply about the film before until preparing for this recording. Just kind of thinking through it because for me there's nothing to do but enjoy the movie. I mean, it's so beautiful. You know, there's not. It's just. It just sort of washes over you. I can't think of a more beautiful film off the top of my head. Maybe some Merchant Ivory films or something, but I'd say they're on par. 6:25 Wes: I have a complicated relationship to beauty, I think, but so does everybody. 6:31 Erin: Don't we all? Yes. Yeah. It's so gorgeous. And I think the film. I think I watched it at such an impressionable age and it made such a huge impact on me. It's like, embedded in my psyche in some strange way. So lots of images from the film, the birds collaged with Miranda's face and various other things are extremely. Or even just the opening credits with the rock rising from the mist. Like, that's like one of the main images from that. That time in my life, maybe. 7:01 Wes: And it is. What. It's 1975, so it's right there in my. My wheelhouse. 7:06 Erin: I know, I know. 7:07 Wes: 60s and 70s. 7:08 Erin: Yeah. I thought. I thought this would have. Be a crossover hit for us, but alas. Well, maybe we'll still have some. An interesting conversation here. But anyway, it's also sort of. I'm not sure if it's propaganda for or against poetry, but certainly poetry plays a big. Plays a big part in this film as well. You know, we have the character of Sarah. Well, you know, before I even get into that, I'm also curious to know because I was sort of polling people. Who do you think the main character is? 7:35 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking about that. A little bit, because we really were getting a few different stories. In some ways, Sarah seems to be the protagonist. In some ways. Michael Albert, of course, has his own arc. In a way, the strongest arc belongs to Mrs. Appleyard herself. So maybe it's an ensemble movie. Maybe we have multiple characters or I'm sure someone has said in an essay somewhere, ooh, it's the rock, it's hanging Rock is the main character. There's a lot of fading shots in this movie where you get one image overlapping another. Right. Maybe that's the main character. Just that transition, the collage itself. 8:21 Erin: Well, there's something to that. I think the film is really interesting. Interested in photography, oddly, and also in reproductions and images and mirror images. Something about the nature of the film itself seems. Seems to be thematic. But I was thinking about that maybe lack of a main character as somehow, I don't know, somehow an expression of this idea that the genre seems to me to be an anti mystery, for lack of a better term. So we have, you know, we have a movie that's acting as though it's going to be some kind of procedural crime drama and it just routinely dismantles those expectations. And I think we discover very soon that they aren't going to be solved or settled. But then we do get some, you know, one of the girls does come back and we do have this repeated effort on the part of the characters to solve the mystery. It becomes kind of a low key media sensation in the film. And I wonder if the fact that there is no locatable main thread or maybe the main character is Miranda who then just disappears. So then you're sort of dealing with a film in which the protagonist is simply gone and the film is trying to reckon where the story is trying to reckon with working itself out in a vacuum. Because this girl seemed to have been such a pivotal. She has a kind of cult of personality around her at the school. And so the film seems. 9:45 Wes: She might be the antagonist. 9:47 Erin: She might be. She might be. That's right, yeah. And you know, we think that maybe the police officer is gonna, you know, come in and have a disappointment arc, at least if he's not going to solve it. But you know, I was thinking about the mystery's association with a single protagonist or with the figure of a detective or someone who comes in and solves it all and figures out who the antagonist is. You know, like part of the mystery story seems to be about figuring out actually who the. Who the characters are and how to classify them. Right. So the Fact that it is an anti. Anti mystery, as I'm. As I'm suggesting. And the fact that the characters are all. All important and unimportant. Is this sort of an egalitarian film, in a way, is, I think, indicative of the fact that the Rock doesn't have a narrative that we can attach to it. It doesn't have the story, doesn't have something we could pull out and say this is the explanation. In the same way that we can't look among these people and say that's the most important person because that's the person that, you know, everything hinges on. 10:48 Wes: Yeah. Maybe it's worth just describing a few of the different arcs and broad brush, you know, what is Sarah's story? Sarah is an orphan and she's been separated from her brother Bertie, who turns out to be Albert. And some unknown benefactor far away is financing her attendance at this boarding school where she is quite out of place socioeconomically. Although we get an idea that there are probably other girls like her there as well. But she's certainly in the minority compared to all the posh, privileged girls she goes to school with. And she's got a defiant streak. She's not doing her work. She wants to compose poetry rather than simply read it from memory. It gets her held back from going to Hanging Rock to getting involved in that adventure where she could well have been one of the ones who never came back. Right. She would have followed Miranda to the very end, all the way up to, you know, sex Heaven or wherever they ended up going. Oh, boy. Floated up on a red cloud into. But 12:04 Erin: into the spaceship. 12:06 Wes: And so what happens to her? Well, she loves, you know, her and Miranda have this very loving relationship. And it's a bit asymmetrical, of course. Miranda has a superior position and it looks kind of pities and condescends in a way to Sarah. And Sarah seems to look up to and idealize Miranda. But then in a way, she's abandoned. Miranda tells her, look, find someone else to love because I won't be here much longer. And explicitly, she's returning to the fact that alluding to the fact that she's going to be moving on from the school, although one and read it as a prophecy. And this is the way Sarah later on reads it, is that Miranda knows she's not going to be coming back. This is after Miranda says, you'll have to come meet my quirky, funny family. I forget how she puts it, but one day you'll have to come visit my sweet, funny family for Yourself, which is a rather nonchalant way to put that to someone who themselves doesn't have a family. But she goes from that to the very abandoning idea. But you also have to find someone else to love. I won't be here much longer. And then Miranda does complete that abandonment. You know, if you want to read it on some level, as Miranda purposefully, like the Pied Piper meeting everyone except Edith, who's sensibly hysteric about sex, runs screaming down the mountain, she leaves Sarah behind and Sarah is once again abandoned. And not only that, Miranda's. Again, if we read Miranda's having done all this, it leads to the school being in big financial trouble and trouble otherwise, which means Appleyard has to crack down and kick Sarah out, which leads to Sarah's suicide. So you can see why I would want to frame this dynamic in terms of. So that's just one arc. I'm not going to go do them all. Maybe you can do the next one. We could do Appleyards or something next. But you see, the. That's one story, but it's not even the story. You couldn't say that that story, that Sarah's story. Right. Takes up a huge part of the film, or is the main thing in the film, because it's so evenly balanced between these other stories, But. 14:18 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I did some thinking yesterday about Sarah as a representative of the Romantic. The capital R romantic sensibility versus the Victorian sensibilities of the school. You know, we could think of Sarah as the antagonist to Mrs. Appleyard, or Vice versa, but we have these twin portraits that are featured semi prominently in the film, where Mrs. Appleyard has that prominent portrait of Queen Victoria in her office. I think it is. It looks like everything is so heavily upholstered in every room that Mrs. Appleyard is in, it's difficult to tell what the purpose of the room is. She has a portrait of Queen Victoria and it, of course, takes place in the state of Victoria in Australia. Newly named, I would imagine. Not quite so newly named, but maybe. And then in Sarah's bedroom, she has the portrait of Byron. And of course, as a lover of Byron, she's obsessed with her brother, so she has this. This desire to, as you, as you've already mentioned, to write poetry herself. She writes. Is it an ode to Saint Valentine? It's not an ode to. For some reason, I thought it was Cupid for a second, but I second guessed myself. Ode to Saint Valentine. I think it is. 15:27 Wes: Yeah. It's an ode to St. Valentine, yeah. 15:30 Erin: She writes herself, which one could imagine is a kind of Keatsian or Byronic composition, but is instead being forced to read, well, Heman's Casabianca or Longfellow's the Wreck of the Hesperus. Mrs. Appleyard is not really up on her English lit the way that she imagines that her. That she is. So she misnames or misidentifies the author of the Wreck of the Hesperus as Felicia Hemans. Both of these poems that she refers to, the Wreck of the Hesperus and Casabianca, are about young children, either in the Wreck of the Hesperus, sacrificed because of the flaws of the parent, or in Casabianca, sacrifice to duty that they perform at the behest of a parent. So both of them are about children who end up dead. And both of them, I think, are representative of a kind of Victorian sensibility towards what we might call typical Victorian middle class values. So we have familial duty, duty to one's parents, honor, staying at one's post, doing one's job. In the Wreck of the Hesperus, this is literally she's staying at her post. Her father goes out to sea in the middle of a hurricane. He's warned against doing this, but he's too prideful. And as it's clear that the ship is going to potentially be wrecked, he ties his daughter to the mast to try and save her. She's later found by a fisherman, dead, still tied to the mast. The ship was wrecked at Norman's Woe in Gloucester, Massachusetts. So anyway, the conflict between these two sets of values, I think, are interestingly indicative of the nature of this school, of the nature of Victorian society itself, of Australian history. All kinds of things are kind of coming together in this clash between Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard. Sarah also, you know, the name and the fact that she's an orphan at this wealthy school reminds me of Sarah Crewe and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, if familiar with that Victorian novel for children. But essentially we have this, what do we want to call it? An aristocrat of the soul, you know, a princess in rags who represents a kind of earlier sensibility versus these, the middle class values of Mrs. Appleyard trying to run a school in which she has all of these little princesses in her charge. And it's like she's an administrator in a place where there's all this plutonium that might go off at any moment and she's the one responsible for, like, keeping the lights on and, you know, making sure. That. That everything runs according to plan. 18:06 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. 18:08 Erin: I just want to say that I think that, you know, this romantic sensibility is very much a teenage girl sensibilities. The idea of Victorian society is to take all of these things and all of these feelings and repress them according to a kind of middle class value system which ended up being imposed from the very top. 18:30 Wes: Right. 18:30 Erin: Victoria herself is a sort of like, you know, angel of. Of middle class values. Very different from the kinds of aristocratic values which were previously ascendant in the English empire and representative of people like Lord Byron. And. And so the clash between these things is like the clash between nature and repression, between the Australian continent and the English colonizers. All of these things, I think, are represented in this clash of wills between Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard, in which Sarah is fatally outmatched ultimately, but Then so is Mrs. Appleyard in a way. 19:14 Wes: Yeah. So I like. There's a lot of different parallel conflicts here that you're pointing to. One is between parent and child when it comes to the process of civilizing children, and likewise to like a, you know, between a Victorian colonialist project and the people who are supposed to be civilized by it. Right. There's also a picture of a tiger on Mrs. Appleyard's wall. Not just Queen Victoria. So you get right. The project of the boarding school is in parallel to this, you know, colonials project. And. And then, of course, there's more broadly civilization versus nature, which comes out right in the film. In a way, they're going up against the natural world and they're not equipped for that. And then, as I've said on the podcast before, I think femininity codes is more civilized and also more upper class. So there's a class dynamic, upper versus lower class. But then there's the whole question of what represents the very essence of civilization or moral stricture, which is in some sense the feminine. And then whatever that comes into clash with, which is not easily put right, because nature is not coded as masculine. Nature is also a raw feminine force. But given Appleyard's project with all these dreamy, semi psychotic young girls, you know, burgeoning adolescent sexuality and writing poetic valentines to each other and reading them at the beginning of the movie, you know, to each other, there's one thing you don't want to do, which is hire a French teacher. What's her name? Is it de Poitiers? 20:59 Erin: Yes, it is. Diane de Poitiers. Which is. Which must be Mademoiselle, a reference to the famous Famous royal mistress. 21:08 Wes: She's just DP in my notes. I didn't want to write it out every time. D.P. so, mademoiselle. Now, I don't want to try to say that on the podcast each time either, but we'll just call her Diane maybe. 21:18 Erin: Yeah, sure. 21:19 Wes: Mademoiselle is the French teacher. Well, she. In a school where you have a lot of grim, tight assed women like Appleyard or Ms. Lumley, other than the lower class staff like Minnie, for instance, the French teacher stands out as she's young, she's beautiful. In a way, she's one of them. Or, you know, partly one of them. She's the one who gives them permission to go up on the rock even though Appleyard warned them before they even left. Don't do that. You're not allowed to do that. I forbid it. In a way, the French teacher participates or colludes in the whole. This whole project by giving in to them and saying they're allowed to go up by themselves. Even to the point where when Miranda is leaving and turns back and gives that very potent goodbye, as if it's going to be her last goodbye. And what does de Poitiers say? She says, now I know she's one of. You know what I think? Is it Ms. McCraw who asked her? You know what she is? A Botticelli angel. She's been looking at Botticelli in her art book. Right? 22:35 Erin: Yes. 22:36 Wes: Yeah. Don't let these French libertines into your school if you want to keep things. 22:41 Erin: I know. Shouldn't the English know better? 22:43 Wes: Appleyard sows her own destruction with all that. So, I mean, just looking at her arc. Right. Yeah. She's tasked with this project. Her husband is dead. She's hitting the sauce on the side because of the stress. She's not without heart. She's not without a conscience. She has a little bit of a breakdown. Has to give Sarah the bad news about leaving. What is so funny about that? 23:10 Erin: You're just so funny. That is so funny. Sorry. You should do just like, you know, like. Like two minute summaries of art films. Appleyard, what's her deal? She's hitting the sauce on the side. 23:29 Wes: But it's a very tragic arc for her, of course, which is that in the end she's willing to lie. Who is it who lies in the movie? She lies. Who else lies? 23:40 Erin: Michael. 23:41 Wes: What does Michael lie about? 23:42 Erin: He says that all he did was watch them cross the creek. 23:46 Wes: Yeah, right. 23:46 Erin: But then he's. Then he mentions that the dumpy one film is so cruel to Edith, that the dumpy one was following behind after them. So we know from that that he actually. And then he later admits. And we could see why he does this, because he's a suspect. 24:01 Wes: Yeah. 24:01 Erin: But he then admits that he did follow them a little ways and he saw that Edith was trailing behind when they crossed the creek. Miranda was the last to cross. 24:08 Wes: So he kind of leaves that out until he's brought it. But, yeah. Yeah, let's just see what he says here. Yeah. Then there was a little dumpy one. And then Albert's like, crikey, wait, what is his name? What is the Australian slang? Not lassies, but. 24:29 Erin: Oh, Sheila's. 24:31 Wes: Sheila's. Crikey. Oh, Sheila's. 24:35 Erin: I wonder if anyone thought maybe the dingo ate the girls. 24:38 Wes: Anyway, so Edith is the third. And then he pauses and then said the last one was slim and fair. And then the sergeant says, that's four. So he had said three. And what the sergeant notices is that he's listed four girls. And of course, the. Miranda is the one who's the fourth, is the afterthought, in a way. And she's the one who figures so prominently in Michael's fantasies. And then Michael's explanation is that. Well, that's because the dumpy one was back a little, which doesn't quite make sense to me now, because Edith is the third one. Where does he admit to following, though? Maybe I'm. Maybe this is the wrong. 25:16 Erin: A later scene. I think he admits to it. 25:19 Wes: That's right. Sorry, Yeah, I pulled us into the wrong scene. So, yeah, a little bit later, the sergeant says this is when he's at tea with Michael. And I guess it's to the side of this party, this posh, fancy party. Sergeant says, why didn't you tell us you followed the four girls? And Michael says, I didn't exactly follow them. I just jumped across the creek and walked towards the rock for a little way. I was curious. In England, young ladies like that wouldn't be allowed to go walking in the forest. Not alone, anyway. But what if they had a French governess? Anyway, but they'd gone by the time I'd come out of the trees, so I turned back. And we'll never know, of course, if there's more to this story. Michael, of course, seems so sympathetic with the girls. He's gonna search for them and find one of them. And, you know, it would be interesting to know if he was just a madman murderer, maybe forgot he had murdered them and left one alive. But anyway, we'll never know. But that's. Yeah, I guess we don't really know how the sergeant finds out that he followed them. Maybe Albert outed him, who knows? But he's confronted about that fact, so at the very least, he's omitted that. But I can't think of any other direct lies. But just coming back to Appleyard, the one that she tells is unfortunate. I don't know, what's the word? It's quite a transgression because the lie is that Sarah has been picked up by her benefactor. Right. Sarah has been picked up. Picked up by her guardian and she's telling that to de Poitiers, the French teacher. Why is she doing that? Because at this point, the French teacher has become very concerned about Sarah and Appleyard doesn't want to seem like a cruel. You know, the cruel one who's kicking Sarah out of the school. Is that right? 27:06 Erin: I think so. 27:07 Wes: I think I was just bringing that up because that's a critical mistake. That is part of why she, in the end, is done right. Once Sarah kills herself. 27:18 Erin: Yes. 27:18 Wes: And by the time they even find Appleyard, she's already dressed in what looks like a morning outfit and has everything packed. She knows she has to go. I'm not sure if she had been honest about that situation that she would necessarily have to go, but that is kind of the nail on her coffin, or am I right about that? So I'm just looking at the kind of tragic element of what's going on with her, where her need for to be overly controlling backfires in these important ways. 27:47 Erin: Yes. But at the same time, she too, is permissive. Why does she let them go to Hanging Rock? You know, this is. This. This is the big one of the big questions here. Certainly not the main big question, but 27:59 Wes: I think McCraw is wondering that in the beginning. 28:01 Erin: That's a great speech. Yeah. And, you know, and with a name like Appleyard, there are a lot of. We can make a lot of biblical connections here. She's permissive enough to let them go. And I could go in a lot of directions here. There's the nature of the picnic. There's this idea that perhaps Appleyard is so disconnected from reality, she's not actually aware of the extent to which she is playing with fire. So, you know, this is a sort of replica of a traditional English boarding school transplanted to Australia. There's this Georgian mansion surrounded by palm trees. There are all of these traditions that seem to be kept alive here. You know, they're not allowed to Remove their gloves until they've gone through the town. It's clear that there's a townie school kind of antagonism going on here, or at least a fascination by the townspeople for the girls. And then we have a picnic itself, which is about. I mean, to the extent that I understand the origins of the practice, I think it's about mimicking the kind of al fresco lunch that the field workers would normally have. But it's an upper class tradition in which, you know, let's go outside and have a meal. Like these people who we are, who are so far below us on the social strata. You know, let's mimic that idea because it seems like so fun to sit outside and, you know, get baked in the sun the way that these poor people are. So there's a play acting, right, involved in all of it, just like there's a play acting involved in Victorian society and maybe a willful ignorance or just an ignorance of what's really going on here. You know, so much emphasis seems to be placed on their, you know, near seclusion from the society of the town. And it seems that the homosocial aspect of this school is designed to sort of like keep anything from. Keep any hanky panky from going on, you know, and that's the kind of ignorance, perhaps that, that we're dealing with here. And so on the one hand, we can just say it's ignorance that she doesn't understand the forces at play. She doesn't understand that, you know, nature will find a way or whatever, whatever expression we want to use there. 30:16 Wes: Say that in the voice of 30:19 Erin: Richard Attenborough. Right. 30:22 Wes: No, no, it's Jurassic Park. 30:25 Erin: That's what I was thinking of. Yeah, I thought it was Jeff Goldblum. 30:29 Wes: Yes, there you go. 30:30 Erin: Yeah, I thought, I thought it was the old man who said it, Richard Attenborough. But anyway, regardless, then there's the aspect of voyeurism that might be an explanation. You know, they're supposed to go up to the rock, they're supposed to sit at the base of the rock, but they're not supposed to touch the rock. Voyeurism seems to be a big theme in the film as well. Obviously Michael looks at the girls, the girls look at the rock, the rock looks at them. Sometimes in certain shots it looks literal. 30:56 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting because McCraw will early on point to the foolishness of going out for a picnic in a dangerous environment. So she'll say, this we do for pleasure, so that we may shortly be at the mercy of Venomous snakes and poisonous ants. How foolish can human creatures be? We could say this about any kind of excursion or anything we do for pleasure. We're increasing the risk to ourselves. We could just stay at home. You know, if we hadn't gone the walk, we wouldn't have been hit by the car and so on and so forth. It's a bit more extreme in this case. Right. Because this is Australia and this is, I guess, the. Technically the bush or something. 31:37 Erin: Yes. 31:37 Wes: And untamed nature. And they do have a lot of poisonous snakes. It's not just. I was gonna say, like, going out in Georgia, but actually, Georgia has a lot of poisonous snakes, too. 31:47 Erin: But not. But not even that. 31:48 Wes: I dealt with my share of snakes in Georgia. Yeah, go ahead. 31:52 Erin: There's an even more obvious principle at work here, which is when you're a teenager and you go to a big barbecue or something, there's always the party separate from the party. Right. The teenagers always break away. They find a way. They go up on the roof, they go behind the shed, they go, you know, whatever. Right. Like I've. Every single party I ever went to at a teenager where there were adults, you always break away and you have your own little whatever. You find a pool house. You find some room that nobody else is in, and you all hang out. And usually there's some, you know, funny business that goes on with something. I mean, even. You know. I don't mean that. 32:33 Wes: If this were an 80s movie, you know. Yeah. Someone would be topless. There'd be pool scene. 32:40 Erin: Right, Right. 32:41 Wes: It'd be a party. There'd be a. Yeah. 32:42 Erin: I mean, there wouldn't even be any parents around at all because they're just, you know, latchkey kids. But somehow the parents are always gone. 32:51 Wes: Hanging Rock would be the name of a. Name of a mall now. 32:54 Erin: Right? Exactly. Yeah. No, but you know what I mean, like, there's always. There's always something and something always happens. You know, somehow they've, you know, somebody finds liquor or something and someone either gets hurt because they're jumping off of something or, you know. 33:10 Wes: Yeah. So there's the danger represented by nature, and then there's the dame. Danger represented by their. Their impulses. 33:16 Erin: Yeah. 33:16 Wes: Which are, of course, of a piece with nature in a way, and they're the way in which we're closest to nature. 33:21 Erin: Yeah. 33:22 Wes: But instead of the external force of what might come from the outside, like a venomous snake, which is obvious, of course, it could be read as having something to do with sexuality and the dangers of sexuality yeah. What's at stake are also impulses. One of the impulses, as you said, is to. Is maybe voyeuristic, but there's also just more. Ordinarily, there's the impulse just to go outside and have fun, and then there's. There's sexual impulses, there's aggressive impulses, there's all sorts of things that maybe have more play or more range in the natural environment. 33:57 Erin: Yeah. And I suppose, you know, Appleyard, by not going, by staying at home, I mean, you know, I want to maybe interrogate why Sarah is also made to stay. I guess there's the suggestion, because of what Appleyard says later about Ms. McCraw, that Ms. McCraw was supposed to be sort of her deputy and that. 34:14 Wes: That fabulous masculine intellect of her. 34:17 Erin: That masculine intellect of hers. Yeah. Is there any other kind? 34:20 Wes: The. 34:21 Erin: The idea is that she. That they were going to be safe, that there was going to be supervision not from a French teacher, but from. But from Ms. McCraw. And yet she was the one. You know, it's like. It's like when the. It's always the most extreme people that are taken in the opposite. The opposite direction. Right. Because to me, you know, many jokes, of course, can be made about the permissive French teacher, but to me, of course, she's most normal person in the film. I think that's clear. The French teacher seems to be the most well balanced, considering that they're. That the school environment is so repressive, bizarre. Any school environment is repressive and bizarre for reasons we could also talk about. But the fact of the matter is she seems the most normal and she has the most human feeling of anyone. And so therefore, sort of, by definition, she's not going to be susceptible to conversion in the same way that Ms. McCraw is. Of course, the movie leaves it open that McCraw might have been just following them to try to get them back. But we have the detail of her having taken off her dress. Of course, that, too may be evidence that she was trying to get them back. It was an extremely hot day. She might have been just being practical and once she realized that the girls were gone, was trying to make an earnest effort at summiting this rock as quickly as possible to get to them. And she, too, fell, or whatever explanation we wanted to. Same might have happened here. But on the other end of the spectrum, there's the argument that McCraw, because she's so repressed, was therefore ripe to be taken in by the forces of capital, nature and capital S. Sexuality and whatever else might be going on. 35:58 Wes: Yeah, well, her first, I guess, misstep, if you want to read it as that is to kind of not say anything when the French teacher says, yeah, you can go up on the. 36:08 Erin: Yes. 36:08 Wes: She gives a look, I think as they leave, she looks a little bit alarmed or nonplussed by the French teacher saying, now I know, now I know. And you know what, you know that Miranda's a Botticelli angel. But she doesn't intervene. And she said some very. I don't know, she comes across almost as a soothsayer earlier on, right? So after that remark about what we do for pleasure, you know, not long after they've taken their gloves off and Hussie says, there she is, ladies, Hanging Rock and crosses. The mountain comes to Muhammad. A hanging rock comes to Mr. Hussey. And I had to look up this whole idea, right? If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must come to the mountain. Which I take to be the idea is that we can't just get what we want through fantasy. We either have to work for it or we have to come to terms with reality and give up on it. But in this case she seems to be suggesting that Mr. Hussey's kind of lower class and therefore meager ambitions, right, are being somehow rewarded. And I don't know, maybe they're being rewarded in like manner with this weird monstrosity instead of a mountain, right? Something in a way deformed or maybe something's coming to too easily to him, I'm not sure. But she goes on to give us the science behind Hanging Rock. It's volcanic and it's. Or actually Hussy says that. And McCraw will correct him and say it's not just thousands of years old, but it's millions of years old and 37:44 Erin: it's actually just 1 million years old. Relatively young, she says, compared to the rocks around it. 37:49 Wes: Oh, right, it's Hussy, right? She says a million, then Hussey says thousands. Millions. Devil of a long time away in a manner of speaking. Okay, Samwise. And then she corrects him again. One million years ago. And she'll say, quite a recent eruption, really. The rocks all around Mount Macedon itself must be all of 350 million years old. Siliceous lava forced up from deep down below. Soda trachytes extruded in a highly viscous state, building the steep sided mamelons we see in Hanging Rock. And quite young geologically speaking. Barely a million years. 38:25 Erin: Please, Wes, this is supposed to be a podcast for kids. Stop reading. 38:31 Wes: Right. So what she's describing there, it sounds like the hanging rock is kind of like it's a congealed ejaculate, right? 38:41 Erin: Yes. 38:41 Wes: Highly viscous. Or it's something almost. It's been frozen. It's a snapshot of ejaculation that's frozen in time. And now you can go climb on it if you want. 38:51 Erin: Right. 38:52 Wes: So pretty gross. 38:55 Erin: It is. 38:56 Wes: And then right after McCraw says that, a girl says, waiting a million years just for us. So why am I bringing that up? You mentioned. Okay. Her susceptibility to being converted, which had me thinking, I think for the first time of the mine ads. I don't know why I didn't think of this before, because there's a lot of dancing and frenzy and the girls are taking their. There's a shot where I think it's Miranda's taking a stocking off. They're just trying to take their shoes off, but in a very sexually suggestive kind of way. And as we know. Right. The Maenads were followers of Dionysus, so the God of pleasure and ecstasy. Their whole shtick was to get into that state of ecstatic frenzy that we all know and love, that in the 80s movie would just be accomplished with alcohol. But. So I wonder now, I wonder if St. Valentine has actually become Dionysus. But that's another question. I wanted to point to this role for McCraw that you've pointed to as sort of the surrogate for Appleyard and an authority figure who is. She's another failure point. Right. Not just the French teacher. She's a failure point in the sense that her. What seems like a scientific fascination is covertly, as her little speech seems to suggest, a quasi sexual fascination. 40:18 Erin: Yeah. In her book she's reading about, there's a triangle and it has a point P and point Q. So there's P's and Q's in there. I was trying to make more. I was trying to think of, you know, a dirty way to read what she was reading, but I couldn't think of one. But yes, I had the same. The same thought. I can't quite remember at this point, but in the novel it is noted that Ms. McCraw is too intelligent to be working at this school. That she's actually a first rate mathematician, like a real genius mathematician, and that it's odd that she should be working at the school. 40:51 Wes: Well, it's funny because when McCraw is coming out of the school with her parasol and the French teacher and the girls kind of close their circle. You can see McCraw is a bit of an outsider to this. And. And the French teacher speaks in French to Irma, saying, be quiet, Irma. Ms. McCraw's arriving like she's part of their little. This is part of what's inappropriate about her behavior. But anyway, yes, she's full of human feeling, but she's a little bit. She doesn't have proper boundary here. Yeah. But she says. Someone says. And I forget who it is. I don't know. I think it's one of the girls says she wants algebra today. And then I think it's the French teacher or someone says, today. Right. And this is part of her masculine intellect, right? This interest in things like algebra or geometry and science. And, you know, today of all days, the day that's supposed to be about love. That's what she's on about. But it turns out to be not the music of the relevant interest, as you're pointing out, with the P's and the Q's and the triangles, you know, and the. 41:52 Erin: Yeah, right. The erotic is always in the triangle. The one thing I wanted to say about your point about Dionysus is that, of course, when the French teacher notes that Miranda looks like a Botticelli angel, she's looking at Venus. She's looking at an image of Venus. So not a. Not a Christian image. Right. And then we have the idea, of course, embedded in that of Venus and Cupid, of the. Of the cherub versus the. Versus the God, you know, the Christian and laminated onto the pagan. So it's just an interesting. It's not a mistake per se, but it's just an interesting thing to say, to look at Venus and say it's an angel. 42:29 Wes: Since we were talking about Saint Valentine and Dionysus, I was just thinking about what's the relationship between love or Eros and then the Dionysian. And. Right. They both, of course, involve the ecstatic. And a little bit of Dionysus is good if you want to try and get yourself to the point of Aphrodite and love. Right. Wine is conducive to sex, for instance. But in a way, the Dionysian, I think might reflect the darker side of Eros. So irrational frenzy and potentially violence. Right. The maenads actually ripped people apart, including Pentheus, people who piss off Dionysus. And I think Plato, he wants to point to something. What's constructive about love in the Symposium and the way in which it. That can be Sublimated and lead us to higher unities and to an interest in truth or the good. I think he also indirectly is evoking this idea of the Dionysian via Diotima and his own daimon, such that there's a kind of ecstatic or manic element to higher interests, including the sorts of interests. Right. Which like the ones that McCraw have in the mathematical and the scientific. So we are always, you know, you can get a little worked up by a little too much doing too much algebra or philosophy for that matter. It can lead you into ecstatic places and into erotic places, which then threaten a kind of regression. 44:05 Erin: That's what's convenient about being obsessed with poetry. It's just being ecstatic about the ecstatic. It's so clear. 44:14 Wes: Yeah. You're closer to the real thing. So you don't need to go kill yourself on a. On a rock. 44:23 Erin: Well, no. Instead you throw yourself through the roof of a garden shed. 44:27 Wes: But only if things go right so much. 44:29 Erin: Yes, that's right. 44:30 Wes: That's right. 44:31 Erin: My things might work out, which they always do anyway. All right. Yeah. So I think that what maybe we should start talking about in part two is a little bit about Australia itself, perhaps, and maybe some speculation as to at least talk of the backstory of Mrs. Appleyard, perhaps. And maybe the ways in which the school environment and the sort of odd culture that schools create and the colonial environment aren't so different. And maybe what. What we can glean through that about the teachers, more about the teachers themselves. Okay, so we'll continue our conversation in part two. Thank you. 45:16 Wes: Thank you. 45:20 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Wes & Erin discuss “The Indian to His Love.” Upcoming Episodes: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: patreon.com/ subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part four of our four part series on Yeats. For this part we're going to discuss the Indian to his love. Erin, were you familiar with this poem before reading it for today? 0:43 Erin: I was not. I was not familiar with this one. 0:46 Wes: Yeah, it's an early poem. He wrote it when he was 23. You don't see as much written about this. I had trouble finding anything really, but I didn't look that hard. But I was looking in, you know, collections of critical essays and things like that. 0:59 Erin: You mentioned you love this poem. So I don't want to say anything bad about it, but I will say that this, this is a bit of my nightmare vision of a relationship. It scares the crap out of me, this poem. 1:12 Wes: Yeah, well, I think it's meant to. 1:14 Erin: Yes, yes, yes, I think so too, at the end. Yeah, but. 1:18 Wes: But I was curious. I was wondering if you were going to think, oh, well, this is juvenile or something like, you wrote it when he was 23. Yes, yeah, I'm too ignorant. To me it's just a nice bump advanced enough to make the distinction. So anyway, but it occurred to me, okay, yeah, others might not think this is that great maybe, but yeah, Yeats 1:41 Erin: is one of the few poets to really take a whole lifetime to. It's the rare poet who writes his best work so late in his life. Right. So there's a sort of lifetime of apprenticeship and sort of like gearing up for that great work that has to happen. So ordinarily the poem of a 23 year old super famous poet would be, you know, a Keats or something like that. In this instance, it sort of. It sort of reads to me like juvenilia, because Yeats is such a slow starter, not in terms of output but in terms of greatness, you know. 2:14 Wes: Well, I really. I think the thing that grabbed me about this poem was the last two lines of the first stanza. A parrot sways upon a tree, raging at his own an image in the enameled sea. And I know you haven't read this yet, so you should read it in a Second. Second. But I just wanted to say that. That it's. It's those two lines that I think made this a poem that I always. That I, you know, I had a weakness for. Yeah. 2:36 Erin: What's the seed of so much to come, you know? So it's interesting to see it appear here. Like. Oh, he's really interested in birds and narcissism. Narcissism and enamel. And water, apparently, that doesn't undulate at all, even though it's the same. Anyway. 2:54 Wes: Guess it's a lagoon or something. Well, yeah. Why don't you read it before we say more? 3:00 Erin: Okay. The island dreams under the dawn and great boughs drop tranquility the peahens dance on a smooth lawn A parrot sways upon a tree Raging at his own image in the enameled sea. Here we will moor our lonely ship and wander ever with woven hands Murmuring softly, lip to lip along the grass, along the sands Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands how we alone of mortals are hid under quiet boughs apart While our love grows An Indian star, A meteor of the burning heart One with a tide that gleams the wings that gleam and dart the heavy boughs the burnished dove that moans and sighs a hundred days how when we die our shades will rove When Eve has hushed the feathered ways with vapory footsole by the water's drowsy blaze. Yeah, it's hard to read. The lines are uneven, you know, in length, so the music is kind of a little jaunty. 4:04 Wes: Yeah. Very interesting images to begin with because the boughs are dropping tranquility, which I suppose they would normally be dropping. Fruit. 4:14 Erin: Yeah, I think fruit or blossoms. Flowers, depending on the season. Yeah. 4:20 Wes: So. Yeah. So what's being dropped is tranquility. And it seems to account for the smoothness of the lawn and the smoothness of the sea. The tranquility of the sea. Because for the parrot to be looking at the sea as if it were a mirror, it has to be still. Although I will say that only occurred to me preparing for this episode. I had always thought. I had always imagined this as the sea being raging as well. I was thinking of enamel, not as, like, shiny lacquer, but as like some kind of thickly painted brushstrokes. Thick brushstrokes on a canvas of a raging sea. And the parrot looking angrily into that sea and seeing himself in a more. In a less literal sense. 5:08 Erin: Ah. 5:09 Wes: So. Which is a weird idea to have, but I just hadn't thought about it very, very ever very carefully. And then. Yeah, but obviously it's something that's tranquil. The. The enamel, right. Is the. It's. It's. It's shiny enough to be a mirror that the parrot can see him, see himself in. 5:26 Erin: Yeah. There's this tension here between the natural and the sort of cultivated. Right. Because we have. The island is dreaming. We don't know of what. But I think that that self consciousness or that implication that the island has a kind of consciousness like this is almost. I mean, this is a sort of enchanted place. And then the lawn speaks to me of cultivation. You know, that's not a smooth lawn, is not a naturally occurring thing. And then we have this image of the, as you say, the still water so that the parrot can see his own reflection. But there's a self consciousness there. So there's this. The tranquility seems like this very thin enamel surface underneath which there's something going on here. And it's an un. 6:12 Wes: They might just be at a Sandals. There's no one around. 6:19 Erin: That's right. 6:20 Wes: They had a really nice resort. 6:21 Erin: That's right. That's right. 6:24 Wes: But yeah, the island dreams. Right. So I like that personification in the beginning. Although I guess one might think that's a little too cliched or something. Maybe that's why you might read this as a young poem, that kind of personification right off the bat. But I really like the image. It's dreaming in a way, and so it's conscious, but it's not fully conscious. 6:48 Erin: Yes. And it's not woken up yet, even though dawn has broken to sleeping in as well. Which is what you. 6:54 Wes: You. 6:54 Erin: What you can do with sandals if you don't have an early checkout. Just like this contrast between the natural and the cultivated. There's this contrast, I think, between tranquility and things which are not tranquil at all. I mean, we have raging is. You know, I'd imagine this is a loud parrot. This is an angry parrot. And yeah, maybe because he's not under the boughs getting tranquility dropped on him, but sitting on top of the bow, he's not the beneficiary of the tranquility. 7:28 Wes: Yeah, it really is a very sudden turn at the end of the stanza. It's all been tranquility and smoothness and peahens. And then we can imagine the swaying of the parrot. Right. Have you seen videos of parrots and how they do that swaying thing? So we can all imagine how they do that. It's not a Particularly violent image necessarily. But then, yeah, suddenly we have raging. He's seeing himself in the sea. And you know, we can imagine it like a dog seeing himself in the mirror and thinking another dog and getting angry at the other dog and barking, that kind of thing. 8:03 Erin: That's nice. 8:04 Wes: So it really speaks to kind of dynamic of narcissism involving entrapment in one's own image, but also an element of hatred. Because the image often becomes an ideal image to which one. Right. The real self can't live up to that ideal self. So the self that you see in the mirror is an ideal. And then I fall short of that and that's where the self hatred comes in. 8:31 Erin: I can't imagine looking in the mirror and seeing an ideal. But sure, I know what you mean. 8:37 Wes: So Narcissus. Yes. Narcissus can look in the. And because he's so good looking. 8:44 Erin: Yes. Must be hard. 8:45 Wes: He's gonna see. He's gonna see the ideal there and he's gonna neglect him, his real self until he dies. Because he's so enamored and entrapped in the. In the image. Right? Yeah. So for most of us, we can get what the ideal image is just an aspiration. It's what Freud called the ego ideal, or it's just that it's the person we want to be, it's the person we're striving to be. And then we in real life fall short of it. And so in that gap, conscience plays a role, but also self hate can kind of step into that gap. So if you took to go long to kind of say more about this whole narcissism thing, if you take someone who's really pathologically engrossed in that ideal image of themselves to the point where relatedness with others is. Is discounted, where does the element of. Of rage come in? Right. So if it's some for the failed narcissist, you see the rage come in with. With self hate. But maybe the way to put it is this. Well, there's the narcissism of minor differences. Right. Another Freud rage in animals is rage against. It's not really rage, but aggression against conspecifics. Right. So a lion hunting a deer. The aggression involved is not the aggression involved in that it would have towards a conspecific. Right. If it were competing for a mate, let's say. Then you see things that resemble anger in human beings. So we have to see a creature like ourselves in order to have this sort of rage. I'm really all over the place with this. I'm not explaining anything. I don't know. Not connecting all these threads together. The narcissism of minor differences suggest that we. There's special animosity between. From Russia to Ukraine, for instance, right now because of Putin's fantasy of being one with Ukraine. Ukraine is this part of Russia that has been lost and it must be brought back into the fold. And the way to do that is with violence. 10:54 Erin: The closer you are to something, the more conflict with that thing upsets you. It seems to be the. 10:59 Wes: Well, the more potential for conflict. 11:01 Erin: The more potential for conflict. Okay. Yes. 11:03 Wes: We make more demands on those who are like us. So for instance, Right. We make no moral demands on animals because they're not creatures who are self conscious like us. They're not like us enough. 11:15 Erin: Yes. 11:16 Wes: So we don't get mad when the dog cuts us off in his car, get attacked by a dog and bit. And I don't moralize it. But. 11:26 Erin: Right. 11:26 Wes: With human beings, to the extent that we think that we can get into the mind of another and that they ought to have certain attitudes towards us and that they're doing something wrong if they don't have that attitude. Right. That's where aggression comes in and that's where these very moralized feelings. Right. Aggression as a. And you did something wrong. 11:45 Erin: Yes. 11:45 Wes: Right. The closer we are or the more that we resemble another, the more potential there is to feel wronged as opposed to just saying, oh well, they're alien to me anyway and they don't matter to me. So yeah, let's point to the irony that the parrot is looking at himself in a calm, tranquil medium and yet feels rage at that calmness. So it's sort of. It foreshadows something a bit sinister. Right. In this paradise. I think. Yes, that's going to. That I think we're going to learn about as we get into the details of this very codependent relationship. 12:28 Erin: That's right. 12:30 Wes: Part of this is about the narcissism of lovers and getting trapped in a. With someone. Right. Who is just your mirror in a way. You love them because they are. They seem to be like you and an extension of you to the exclusion of the rest of the world. 12:47 Erin: Yes. 12:48 Wes: I think that's what's being kind of hinted at here. 12:51 Erin: Yeah. So I think what you're suggesting is the idea that they even share the same face. They murmur lip to lip, which could be one mouth. Right. The top lip and the bottom lip of a single mouth. Right. Or they're Murmuring into each other's mouths. 13:07 Wes: You're giving me an idea here that this is like the sixth sense. Like it's just. In the end, you find out it's just one person. 13:15 Erin: Yes, exactly. Exactly. 13:17 Wes: The Indian to himself. 13:20 Erin: That is his love, you know, what are they murmuring about? The point of it all? Like they would have nothing to talk about in this place. Because it seems like there's a level of cultivation here and also of self, you know, whatever we want to call it, like self consciousness. There's a level of. It's not self consciousness, it's dreaming. But that seems related to art. And the fact that this place is enam, like the sea is enameled around it means that there's something sort of constructed or, as I already said, cultivated. You know, the peahens dance. And though on first blush, that might not be. That might just be describing the way that they're moving, that can also be read as evidence of this kind of cultivation in which this whole place is not quite as it seems, or everything is about performance and. 14:04 Wes: Yeah. Or it sounds like we might be in a painting or an art object. 14:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 14:09 Wes: But the enameled part, right inside the 14:12 Erin: urn, the Grecian urn, though, there's some key hints. This is very, very different from the Grecian urn, of course, that is frozen at the point before, just before the moment of consummation, and also at a point of highest intensity. And I think it's significant that it's never really daytime on this island. One of the key things I noticed, right, it's dawn and then it's evening and night in the middle, instead of day, there's a sort of implied day, but we never get any description of full sun. So there's something that's either waxing or waning at any given moment about this place. It's never itself, which seems to me to be suggestive of the fact that it's an art object. It's not the actual thing, it's the mimetic. It's not the real or it's part of a dream. 14:58 Wes: Yeah. 14:58 Erin: Yes, yeah. 14:59 Wes: It's the dream that you're coming out of just as you wake up because 15:03 Erin: you've killed the person that you were stranded on the desert island with because you got on each other's nerves and couldn't take it anymore. 15:11 Wes: I mean, when the narrator says, here we will more our lonely ship. Right, so there's another little bit of a sinister suggestion there. Lonely and more makes me think of marooned. 15:23 Erin: Yes. 15:25 Wes: They were supposed to just be on a three hour tour. Luckily they had sandals. 15:29 Erin: All their clothes. Yes. 15:32 Wes: So this is a day excursion from the resort. It's not. But anyway. And now they're stuck together forever. 15:39 Erin: I knew this was really about the Skipper and Gilligan. Hence one needing to die. Yeah. 15:45 Wes: Wandering with woven hands, murmuring softly, lip to lip. Very romantic. 15:49 Erin: Not to me. 15:50 Wes: Great, if you limit it to part of the day. But it's kind of terrifyingly enmeshed, Right? 15:57 Erin: Yes. 15:58 Wes: And merged at another level. 16:00 Erin: Yes. 16:01 Wes: Which is again where the narcissism comes in. It's like they're the same person, they're not two distinct individuals. 16:07 Erin: Yes. And this is a great way to kill desire. And one day we'll talk about Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, which is like foundational text to me. A lot of my first book is take some ideas from this. But the idea is that what's necessary to the erotic is always some kind of triangulation, whether the third point on that triangle is your beloved's office job that keeps him away from you or a third person rabbit. She. She examines the. This one particular fragment of Sappho's in which she's watching her beloved and trying to put herself in the place of this man who is courting her beloved. Right. And so the idea of the triangulation that she's watching someone else speak to the beloved is really important. The erotic charge, the whole idea of Eros, is that that you can't have desire for what is already yours fully. That you are fully enmeshed with. You can't have desire for that thing. That's. That's a contradiction. How can you desire what you already have? So you need to have some distance, some air, some ability to get away from that person and cultivate desire for that person in order for the relationship to work. And so I read the second stanza and it fills me. Me with terror because this is not any. No one can love another human being under these conditions. It's too much. Right. 17:35 Wes: By the way, we should be mentioning your book more. Well, let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, Erin and her book. Yeah, we should be mentioning the fact that you have a book coming out. When is it coming out? 17:52 Erin: January 20th, 2026. 17:55 Wes: Okay, so we have time. 17:57 Erin: Yes, we have a lot of time, 17:58 Wes: but the more episodes we mention it on, the better. 18:00 Erin: Okay. 18:01 Wes: Because we're not going to be able to insert it as an advertisement after the fact. Yeah. So that's Very cool. 18:07 Erin: Thank you. 18:07 Wes: And tell us the name again. 18:09 Erin: Avail A V A I L. Okay. 18:12 Wes: Are there any poems in it that involve this amount of codependency? 18:18 Erin: All of them end in tragedy if they do. No, no. I have a terror of my speaker, shall we say. There's always that triangulation. Useful tactic. Speaker has a terror of codependency. 18:32 Wes: Okay, good. What these two need is a good veil. 18:35 Erin: That's right. That's right. That's Eros. That's what that's about. The veil is the embodiment of the erotic. Right. It's the distancing tactic, one of many. Something so that you don't murmur lip to lip, and then you can't understand each other. It's like, what? I don't know. Very impractical. 18:55 Wes: Just get away from me. 18:57 Erin: Exactly. But then what do you need to be? If you can already read each other's thoughts, why are you even murmuring? 19:04 Wes: We've been stuck on this island for 30 years already. 19:11 Erin: Draw a line in the sand. This is your half of the island. This is mine. 19:18 Wes: I get this. Peahen. You can have the other peahen. Yeah. So I think this is intentional. I mean, I had the same reading of all this. There's too many clues. 19:29 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 19:30 Wes: And right, so murmuring, how far away are the unquiet lands? Right. Yeah. 19:37 Erin: Yes. Unlike right here, which is so quiet with the raging parrot that won't shut up. 19:42 Wes: Right. Well, the raging parrot. All the rage is inside them, just bubbling. That's the kind of quietude that they have. Right? 19:51 Erin: Yes. 19:51 Wes: Yeah. So everything's quiet and peaceful. It's the serenity now kind of thing. Right. 19:55 Erin: Yes. 19:56 Wes: Seinfeld. 19:56 Erin: Yes. Love it. 19:57 Wes: Yeah. And the parrot is just a hint of what's going on internally. 20:02 Erin: Yeah. But the focus is elsewhere, you know, I like that they're so happy. Unlike over there. Right. Which seems to me also to be indicative of trouble. You know, first of all, they have to tell themselves how happy they are all the time, which is always a bad sign. And second of all, they're fixated on. This is so much better than that place. Right. We have to keep talking about that place and how much better this place is in order to get ourselves feeling good about the situation, which is obviously really a shitty one. So. 20:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I do still find this poem romantic, don't get me wrong. Despite that some of these negative implications, 20:39 Erin: you're just a better person than I am. That's just the way it goes. 20:44 Wes: So in the next stanza, we get we alone of mortals are. So this kind of exceptionalism for the enmeshed narcissistic lovers hid under quiet bowels apart while our love grows. An Indian star. So now we get a bit of a grandiose element here. Right. So there it's. It's a star or a meteor. And I suppose as a star, it could be reminiscent of the star of David. 21:08 Erin: Oh, yeah. Or of Bethlehem. Do you mean. 21:11 Wes: Wait, Bethlehem, the guiding star that took. 21:15 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that's the star of Bethlehem. 21:17 Wes: So it becomes a. It becomes kind of a beacon for others. Their love becomes an emblem. So a meteor of the burning heart, One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart. So now I think we're meant to imagine the. This star reflecting in the water as well, and the wings of birds as they fly, reflecting in the water. And then they become one. So all the things that are reflected are one in the water, which is only. Again, this is another thing that I didn't really think of until this reading that we're doing. 21:48 Erin: Yeah. The words that stick out to me in this stanza are apart. 21:53 Wes: Right. 21:53 Erin: That's a really interesting word. They're apart from what the boughs hid under quiet boughs. 21:59 Wes: Apart apart from the other mortals. 22:02 Erin: From the other mortals. Right. From the unquiet lands. But that apartness could also, you know, at first it seems to reflect that they're actually apart from each other. Immediately. It seems to reflect that it's the boughs that are apart from each other, oddly. Yeah. And then the Indian star. This is a question that I had, which is maybe a stupid question. So this. This is an Indian speaker. So to be an Indian, whether this is related to being indigenous to a place, is that. Am I. Is that wrong? 22:34 Wes: I don't know. 22:35 Erin: I know with India it has a different valence, but is this related to indigenous people? Is that where that origin comes? Is that the same origin? 22:44 Wes: I don't know. 22:45 Erin: Okay. 22:46 Wes: I don't think so. I don't. But I don't know. And I don't know the significance to Yeats, except that it's something exotic and there's an Orientalism going on here. 22:58 Erin: But at any rate, say, putting. Putting that aside, that question, aside of being indigenous, is this an Indian who comes to this island? So it is not an island that they have been to before. So this is not like part of, say, if it's India, it's not part of India. Right. It seems separate from that. It seems outside of that realm. And therefore the star that is created is linked to this couple rather than to the place that they are, even though it seems dependent upon that place as. Or part and parcel of that place as the representative of their love and their love in this particular habitat that grows out of them. 23:36 Wes: So this is something that others can see from far away. They can't have it. Right. We're special. We have our love here. We are apart from everyone, and we don't have to deal with all the noise and all the crap that goes on in the real world. But here, let's kind of hike up a flag so that everyone can see us and envy us or put up a little star. And maybe we're trying to educate people, hey, why don't you be like us? Why don't you be loving something like that? Or maybe they're inducing envy and saying, look how much better we are than all the rest of the. Right. 24:12 Erin: And yet that modifier would suggest that all the rest of them. If this is an Indian, because of his place of origin, the Indian star would be accessible to the unquiet lands as well. 24:24 Wes: Right. 24:24 Erin: Or it would be belonging to the unquiet lands. 24:27 Wes: Yeah. I wonder. I don't know. I mean, I think maybe Indian belongs to the island as well. Just because it's exotic to you and me. It's a faraway place and it's a paradise or a dreamy place or something that's unfamiliar. Whatever associations one might have at that time with India. England has occupied India. Since when? Yeah, I don't know. I couldn't figure out what. Yeah. Does Indian star. Is that an idiom of some sort? Does it mean something in particular? 25:01 Erin: No, Perhaps I'm making too fine a point of it. 25:03 Wes: But associations are. 25:04 Erin: No. 25:05 Wes: Yeah, but why don't you restate your point? Is that the Indian star would be far away from where they are, as opposed to far away from where the readers are. 25:14 Erin: No, that it would be that it seems to sort of arise out of this place which is separate from the unquiet lands. And if the speaker has taken his name from his place of origin and the fact then that the star is given this modifier, which is indicative of, like, a whole society and a whole culture which they had rejected. And therefore that it seems. Yeah, it's like original sin or something. You know, it's like followed them into Eden here. Like, perhaps this island is representative of this. The island itself is the exoticized, idyllic place. And so this is just giving it the name that it also gave those who were moored shipwrecked Whatever we want to call it on it. At any rate, a meteor of the bur. Burning heart is quite interesting because first of all, you could read that as a metaphor of the burning heart. They're very. Two words are quite close. And also meteor seems so transient. Right. It burns out. So we have this eternality versus this sort of flash in the pan. Flash in the sky. 26:20 Wes: And it's moving like the birds. So even though not moving fast enough, probably. Well, meteor is moving fast. Right. A comet. What looks still. Yeah. So it's flashing across the sky. 26:32 Erin: Yeah. Coming right for us. 26:34 Wes: I mean, is Indian star. Is that a. Was there a time when people called. Right. Meteors or like a falling star? 26:42 Erin: I don't know. I looked this up and I couldn't find anything about it. 26:45 Wes: Same with. Same with me. Yeah. 26:46 Erin: I think of the star. Was it the star of India? Wasn't that like a diamond or something? You know, I think of like a jewel. The Star of India, not the Indian Star. No one would call it that, but. But I think of it as like a jewel which is eternal. But this is a meteor which is a hunk of rock which is. I mean, I suppose that's eternal too, depending on where it lands. 27:04 Wes: But burning up in the atmosphere. But as far as. Yeah, the burning part, it doesn't last very long, but it's interesting. Yeah. Because they're loved. They're no longer just in their love. It's become something that's being shown to others, signified to. To others. Something that. And to themselves. Something that they can see. Right. So they can see it in the meteor and they can see it in the reflection of the meteor in the water. Yeah. 27:32 Erin: And it's true, that would be. Ordinarily would be a child. Right. But the child would triangulate the relationship and therefore it has to be something that is only going to last a very short amount of time. It's going to be representative of them, but just in a flat so that it doesn't preoccupy them for too long, it seems. 27:52 Wes: Right. 27:52 Erin: But I like what you point out, that the tide gleams with this light, the wings that gleam and dart. I'm thinking of the. Again jewels, maybe the jewel toned green, perhaps of the parrot reflected in the enameled sea darting. So the parrot's moving. 28:08 Wes: Yeah. Well, we got. Who knows how many types of birds are here. We've got peacocks and doves and parrots. 28:15 Erin: Yes, the burnished. 28:17 Wes: Who's doing the flying? The flying. At this point, I don't know whose wings These are. 28:22 Erin: Well, nobody goes anywhere, so I don't think of any of them as flying. Yeah, they're all sort of stationary. 28:28 Wes: Yeah. So now we get the heavy boughs and the burnished dove, which is interesting, right, because the boughs have dropped tranquility. You might think that the boughs, if they've dropped their fruit or their flowers or whatever, that they're lightened by that. But I suppose if you drop lightness, if you drop tranquility, then you get heavier. 28:48 Erin: Oh, I love that. That's great. Yeah, okay, smart. 28:54 Wes: But also, at this point, right, it sounds like heavy brows, maybe, or it sounds like sleepiness is coming. 29:02 Erin: And then we have the burnished dove. 29:04 Wes: It's been polished, right. Similar to the enameled sea in the beginning. We have something else now that's polished and pointing to its, you know, resemblance to an artifact. And of course, one can't help. Can't help but think of sailing to Byzantium and the bird made of gold at the end. 29:21 Erin: But thus it's a sort of automaton because it. Because it makes noise and it. But it lasts only a hundred days. I couldn't think of the significance of a hundred days. Or maybe it doesn't last 100 days, but it moans and sighs for that long, which is. It seems extremely discontented. 29:39 Wes: It's also extremely irritating. I will tell you from personal experience, one of my staff meetings in the room, there's always a dove in a cage and the thing will not shut up. 29:48 Erin: What? Someone has a dove in a cage and all your staff made it. What kind of symbolism is that? That's insane. 29:59 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. I never thought about that. But anyway, he's happy you got to let the dove out of the cage occasionally, and he's happy he can fly around, but. Yeah, very annoying. Actually, doves are very, very annoying. They're moaning and sighing, so I sympathize with this word moan. So it sounds like the dove is representative of the longing of love here. And that's what they listen to for 100 days. And the moaning is about. So you might even think of the dove as singing about how when they die, their shades will rove. The dove is portending their death. 30:39 Erin: Yes. Not a symbol of peace either, because. Yeah, tranquility has been dropped and now the dove is sitting on the. On the bow. So it's. Yeah. What can we say? What can we say about that? It's confusing a bit. 30:52 Wes: Yeah. Normally we would think of the dove as representative of peace and it would go along with tranquility. But here it's moaning and sighing and introducing a bit of dissatisfaction and tension into this peaceful world. But only for a hundred days, you know, Maybe after that hundred days they just die and become shades. I don't know. 31:13 Erin: That's how long. 31:14 Wes: And they can be there. 31:14 Erin: How long it takes for one to eat the other because they have no. The peahens all run away from them. 31:21 Wes: Right. They've eaten all the birds. 31:23 Erin: There you go. 31:23 Wes: The eve has hushed the feathered ways. Right? Yeah. So the birds do. Something happens to the birds, right? 31:30 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Just a pile of feathers. 31:33 Wes: Hush the feathered ways with vapory footsole by the water's drowsy blaze. The drowsy blaze of the water still, you know, suggests. Right. Some light is still being reflected in it. The light of the meteor. 31:47 Erin: Oh. 31:48 Wes: Or the stars. No, I think of the starry sky in general. Yeah. Because the meteor is such a. Oh, 31:53 Erin: I saw blaze passing thing. Right. But drowsy because it's getting late. So I thought it was sun, like the sunset. But yeah, you're right. The vapory footsole. That's. So I'm taking that as evenings walking on the foliage and leaving dew. Is that right? 32:09 Wes: Well, there's shadows. Our shades will rove the footsole. 32:15 Erin: Oh, that's the shade. 32:16 Wes: The footsteps of the shades, I think. Yeah, vapory footsteps. So they're. Right. So they're no longer fleshy, so to speak. 32:24 Erin: Oh, they're. Yes, vapory in terms of ghostly. Yes, I get it. 32:28 Wes: Yeah. They're ghosts now. Yeah. So if they're leaving footsteps in the sand, I don't know if you've tried as a ghost to leave footprints in the sand. 32:38 Erin: That's good. Yes. I was thinking in terms of water vapor. Dumb. Yes. 32:43 Wes: Well, they're leaving some kind of trace. Right. Some kind of minimal trace, apparently, in something akin to a footstep. But whatever a ghost would. Would leave hints, maybe just a little bit of fog or smoke. I don't know. But yeah, so something vapory, I guess. 33:00 Erin: Yes. 33:00 Wes: There you go. Vapory is vapory. 33:02 Erin: I see. 33:03 Wes: And that seems to be the kind of logical conclusion of their sort of love, which is to become spirits. To become some. You know, to leave their fleshy incarnation and to become. I don't know. 33:19 Erin: Oh, this is so. This is so Paolo and Francesca, isn't it? Yeah, this is hell. Yeah. 33:26 Wes: Yeah, I thought of that. 33:27 Erin: Yeah. I didn't think of that until right now. That's. You're Otherwise would never have thought of it if I didn't think of. Shadowy. Yes. Spirit. 33:37 Wes: Yeah. 33:37 Erin: Yeah. This is a bit hellish. Interesting. Do you think. Do we think he thinks it's hellish or do we think this is just him? I mean, there's a consciousness that there's something not quite right and that this has to end or that this is just a dream. But I don't think that he's. Wink, wink. This is hell. 33:56 Wes: Yeah. And I don't want to disappoint listeners who think of this as a romantic, sweet poem, which I think it still is. 34:02 Erin: Yes. I'm sorry, I'm so. 34:04 Wes: I think it's both at the same. I mean, I think. 34:06 Erin: So jaded. Everyone should not listen to me. 34:09 Wes: There's. There's romance in this idea of merger and being so wrapped up in someone else that you. You disappear, I guess, and maybe you disappear with each other and become these shades. And so it's evocative of death and so scary in that sense. And obviously, on a practical level, it can't be done. It's bad, you know, it's hellish, as you. As you point out. On a practical level, it's not sustainable, but the idea of it is motivating to people, I think. I don't think you can get it out of romance, this type of idea. 34:44 Erin: No, no, probably not. Probably not. It's just when. When put in this kind of way, I mean, of course that's a romantic idea, but then, you know, it's. It's quite extreme. 34:54 Wes: Life will disabuse you of it. You know, when you're young, maybe. Maybe when young ends. This is young. Yeah, right. Conception of love. And then, you know, life. Life will teach you. 35:06 Erin: Well, maybe I like people too much. You know, I don't want. I don't. 35:09 Wes: You don't want them to become shades? 35:10 Erin: I don't want them to be. Exactly. Exactly. 35:12 Wes: Disappear into you. 35:13 Erin: Yeah, that's. That sounds like certainly no fun for them. That's all I have to say. There is something romantic about that idea, of course, but it's put in such a way here as to be so extreme that it really highlights what is terrifying about that prospect, or what is impossible and therefore terrifying about it. 35:29 Wes: There's this show called Man Seeking Woman, which I think I tried to show you, but you didn't. I don't think you liked it. 35:35 Erin: I don't remember. 35:36 Wes: Anyway, it's sort of. It's a show premised on taking metaphors literally. Every episode is about him trying to Find a woman. And so in one episode, he goes out on a date with a literal troll. Or in another, another episode's called Wedding from Hell. And the wedding is literally in hell. Him and his friend have to go down to hell to go to the wedding. But it's all about, like, typical, you know, trials and tribulations of being at a wedding, you know, someone's location, wedding. But in one episode, he. He starts dating someone and they immediately jump into codependency, let's say. And so they get surgically connected to each other. They become Siamese twins, basically, so that they lose their right arm and leg. So they're like, they're still. They're four limbed creature now, but they're right connected at the side. 36:26 Erin: Nice. 36:27 Wes: The very end of the episode when they break up, they just rip apart their bodies and it's just like this bloody mess. Yeah. 36:38 Erin: Nice. 36:39 Wes: So keep your distance, people. Keep your distance. Don't be like these two romantic, sweet lovers on their island, dreaming under the dawn. 36:51 Erin: Yes. 36:52 Wes: No. So hopefully this hasn't been too cynical. 36:55 Erin: I hope. I hope not. I hope not. 36:58 Wes: All right, do we have anything else? 37:00 Erin: No. 37:01 Wes: All right, thank you. 37:02 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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Wes & Erin discuss “Leda and the Swan.” For paid subscribers, includes “The Indian to His Love.” Upcoming Episodes: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part three of our four part series on Yeats. Back in the day we did the Second Coming. That was a long time ago, I guess. Maybe 2020. I don't know. Wow. Yeah. In our last recording we covered sailing to Byzantium. And now we're gonna do for part three, Leda and the Swan and part four, the Indian to his Love, which I always thought was an Indian to his lover. That's the way I remembered it. But it's the Indian to his love and poem that he wrote when he was really young, like 23. So. Yeah, this is Leda is one of the ones you picked. Why did you pick this one? 1:09 Erin: I prefer the romance of Ley. I'm just kidding. 1:12 Wes: So romantic. 1:14 Erin: Yeah, it's incredible. 1:15 Wes: Zeus. You miss the part where he wines and dines her, but it's all implied. He puts on. What kind of music does he put on? The vinyl player. 1:26 Erin: Bird calls. 1:27 Wes: It's gotta be vinyl. 1:32 Erin: You know, I know this poem pretty well, so that's probably why I picked it. And it always reminds me of. I thought we'd get some great, I don't know, great discussion out of it. This poem reminds me of arguments about people always talking about how they want to. They would go back in time and kill baby Hitler or something. And this is. 1:54 Wes: You'd go back in time and kill Western civilization. Well, this is sort of like preventing this rape. 2:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah, this is sort of like going back and you'd have to kill his parents or give them birth control or something. But anyway, that probably sounds completely nuts now that I'm saying this. 2:09 Wes: If we were a different podcast, this podcast would all be all about the meaning of Consent and the complexities of consent. 2:19 Erin: Yeah. 2:19 Wes: But I guess we have to talk about that anyway. I guess that's in there. But before we do that. Yeah. Why don't. Can you tell us a little bit about the myth, the mythology behind us. 2:28 Erin: Yes. Okay. So. So didn't Leda have. So she had sex with her husband. Right. But then she also was raped by Zeus. And she had. 2:39 Wes: On the same night. 2:40 Erin: On the same night. And she had two eggs that she. Like, big. I don't know. I don't know how big the eggs were. I'm not an expert in that. That regard. But anyway, she gave birth to these two eggs from which hatched Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra in one and Castor and Pollux in the other. Is that right? And each of them were. Were half siblings of each other. Right. Because one. It was like one and one went to the. I don't know, there was this one 3:09 Wes: egg and one, and one went to the other. 3:11 Erin: Yes. 3:12 Wes: Half twins. 3:12 Erin: Half twins, exactly. Yes. And so then the brothers. There's a sort of complicated history with Castor and Pollux. I believe they're the twins from the constellation Gemini, but also, like, they helped. I think they helped rescue Helen from Theseus. And there was a whole they die in the Iliad, but then somehow they're still alive in the Odyssey. Like, it's very, very confusing. And then obviously, yeah, Helen and Clytemnestra are the other two, the good brothers and the bad sisters or something. Sounds like my family. 3:45 Wes: So. Yeah. So the Helen and Clytemnestra, two important figures in the Trojan War. Right. So Helen's husband is Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra's husband and murder victim. And as we saw in the Odyssey, there's a bit of, I think, worry for Odysseus about getting back home and having the same thing happen to him that. Right. Happened to Agamemnon. And there's a bit of discussion of that in the. In the underworld, but these are two. So it's a foundational myth. Yeah. What is this, you know, is just from doing a little research, it, you know, oft depicted in the Renaissance, but also for the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was on. They found a fresco of it in Pompeii, which you can see why those libertines in Pompeii would. Would like it. But, you know, it was frequently engraved on small items, pieces of, you know, jewelry, decor, I think. So it got me wondering, well, what is the. What did it Mean, what did this myth mean to the ancient Greeks? Which I don't have a good answer. 4:48 Erin: Right. 4:48 Wes: I mean, I have a speculation. Right. Just, just the association with the Trojan War, which you could say is a foundational myth for the ancient Greeks. You know, it unites all the different tribes in the same place back in the day. But more importantly, it's what they have in common as a literary tradition. And not just literary tradition, but the first. Maybe the first thing that's written down. But Homer unites Greek culture. So sometimes I think, is it really. Yeah. Is it really the content, you know, of the Troy myth that's so important? Or is it just the fact that. That the Iliad and the Odyssey are sort of common. You know, Homer is the, is the common possession of the Greeks and the foundation of their culture, and it's the sort of thing. But, you know, you, you get the impression from reading Plato, right, that it's like the Bible of the society. Everyone knew it and could recite long passages from it. It was just foundational to their, to their education. But so, so anything that, that touches on that, on that myth is of course, important. But I, you know, I couldn't find much. But specifically, I know we can say a little bit why it was significant to Yeats, but I'm just. Before we do that, I don't know much more about why this specific myth got at the imagination of. 5:58 Erin: Yeah, right. Well, that, that's, you know, that was sort of my baby Hitler joke. It's like, how can we trace back to the, you know, the big terrible thing? How can we prevent that from happening? And if we scroll back to this point, could. It's, you know, and eventually it's, well, it would be better if the people involved were never born in the first place or something. Something. Right. But that, and this seems like the origin point, the genealogical basis for the myth. But of course, what we find is that it's turtles all the way down. Right. I mean, we could say that the origin point is really the Judgment of Paris, which itself is, I think, like, very similar to this Leda and the Swan idea in which we have a story about the intervention of the gods, which seems to be just reverse engineering human tragedy and trying to find a cause for it, which is itself no cause at all. Right. So I think that tension is wrapped up in the Leda and the Swan myth in a way which holds all of the complexities of that tension between maybe something like human will, free will, and divine intervention or terror or accident or something like that. Like are all held together in this myth in a way that they're not in the jungle Judgment of Paris. Because the Judgment of Paris is just about how the gods are just causing a lot of trouble. Like, this is about parentage, it's about accident, it's about desire. And all of these things cloaked in something that seems willed, but which is in fact just made up. It seems to me like the perfect point. Like, if we're looking for, okay, how and why did this all happen? Like the same thing with baby Hitler, you know, that's the point at which we would go in and make an intervention or his parents or whatever. You know, this is the point where we would go in and make the intervention to stop the tragedy that happened in Homer. 7:43 Wes: But in this case, if we intervened, we intervene in the foundational myth for Greek civilization, for classical Greek civilization. So in a way, right, what this myth is about is the birth of Greek civilizations through the events that Helen engenders. That's the way Yeats saw this, although he saw it through his weird lens of 2000 year eras. Actually, I'll read a little bit just from what Yeats says about this. I don't want to spend too long on his crazy theories, but it's good 8:18 Erin: to know he demands to be taken seriously. 8:20 Wes: This is. Yeah, right. So to see this kind of thing as a weak point, in a way, in Yeats, but you know, all the stuff in his A Vision book and all his mysticism. But he says, I imagine the Annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda. So it's right that this is an annunciation for him. And we did the Second Coming, which was sort of the annunciation of the era that comes after the Christian era. This is the Annunciation of the era before the Christian era. So in Yeats's terms, this is a subjective Greek era as opposed to an objective Christian era. And what he means by that, it's more associated in his mind with imagination and aesthetic values, whereas the objective era of Christianity is more about. Christianity is associated with dogma and the power of institutions. So there's a bit of nostalgia on Yeats's parts for the mythic and the polytheistic. And in a way, what comes after in the Second Coming in a way sounds like a bit of a return to that. So let me just continue what he says about it. I imagine the Annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers and that from one of her eggs came love and from the other war. But all things are from antithesis. And when in my ignorance, I try to imagine that older civilization that annunciation rejected, I can but see birth and woman blotting out some corner of the Babylonian mythical starlight, which is for him a positive thing. He also wrote in another note. I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor of the Of a political review asked me for a poem. I thought, after the individualist demagogic movement founded by Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution. So not a fan of the Enlightenment after that, we have a soil so exhausted that it cannot grow the crop again. For centuries then I thought, nothing is now possible but some movement from above preceded by some violent annunciation. My fancy began to play with Leda and the swan for metaphor, and I began this poem. But as I wrote, Bird and Lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it. And my friend tells me that his conservative readers would misunderstand the poem. So, you know, at this point. Right. The political aspect of this is Yates's idea that democracy is on its way out at that time, and there will be violent authoritarian governments on the rise, as in the Second Coming. So I think he's related these sorts of things. Anyway, that's all I'll say about what Yeats said. He thought about it because more important is what we. We think it means. Of course. 11:19 Erin: Well, shall I read it? 11:21 Wes: Yeah. 11:22 Erin: Okay. A sudden blow, the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body laid in that white rush, but feel the strange heart beating where it lies, a shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower. And Agamemnon dead, being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air. Did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop. 12:09 Wes: Very nice. You should always end the poem with a nice cliffhanger. 12:14 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 12:15 Wes: So when you write the next poem, people will be waiting for it. 12:19 Erin: I should say what I really love about this poem, actually, are the questions. That's something didn't occur to me until I was reminded reading it. 12:29 Wes: Yeah, I like that as a rhetorical device as well. And it right at the end of the poem, any sense of a typical conclusion or climax or resolution Is it's not completely done away with. Right. But you end with attention instead of a full resolution. And it's a tension that reflects the fact that this is just a, you know, a beginning. 12:52 Erin: So it's interesting that we did Rosemary's Baby just before this because we talked in that about the Antichrist coming into the world through the rape versus the Annunciation, which is, you know, Mary's assent is crucial in that story. Yeah. What you mentioned about Yeats's ideas of these different eras and the Christian emphasizing authority and these types of structures, there's a sort of interesting paradox there, it seems to me, where one emphasizes actually free will, like despite this sort of authoritarian system or these structures which Yeats was sort of like chafing against, they seem to have in them this inherent idea of free will and of one's own, you know, of salvation on the individual level of the idea of redemption. Whereas Greek mythology, you know, we have this rape, this idea in which things just happen to you and you just have to deal with them. So the oppression seems to come, you know, it's just interesting that there's. One is associated with authority and oppression. And then we have Leda and the Swan on the other hand, which is sort of like what? Just the oppression of these sort of cosmic faded, faceless forces which are then just given a face by structures which, as I think I said before, are just trying to. Or by the. By the society which is just trying to reverse engineer the mindless things that happen to people. Right. In other words, like, you know, the drought happens because we didn't pray to the rain God. Right. Like there's an after the fact, a consciousness imposed upon it which is more or less authoritarian. Seems to me to be, you know, open for debate there. 14:39 Wes: Yeah, sounds very anti enlightenment and very romantic. His sympathies? 14:46 Erin: Well, those are mine. So I. 14:48 Wes: Are they really? 14:50 Erin: Yes, I'm very anti enlightenment and pro romantic for, I mean, you know, some big exceptions. 14:55 Wes: That's another discussion. I'm not sure how. I'd be curious to hear about that. But I think with ancient Greek, like mythology, right, as you're pointing out, there's this interface between the divine and the mortal, and in particular the fates of mortal beings are closely connected to the divine. So that what you might see as random chance is connected to the actions of the gods. And in those myths and in Homer, right, you have the gods impregnating mortals and having demigods. And these are demigods. Right. That the ancient Greeks could trace their lineage to Some people somewhere in a particular part of Greece could say, yes, we're the descendant of that demigod, of that hero. And others could say the same thing. So there's this tighter connection between the divine and the mortal. And of course the gods look more, they resemble mortals more, they're less abstract and they have desires. Right. Zeus wants to come down and have sex with Leda. I don't know why he has to do it as a swan, but whatever, you know, whatever you're into. And for him, right, you get at the end of the poem, the indifferent beak drops. There's a kind of. It doesn't sound as if he cares about what fate he's engendering for the world. It's just, eh, I do what I want. Your mortal fates are connected to my desires and my whims. It's kind of tyrannical. Right. But it's not like some sort of providence where he's imagining some future for these, for this people and then forming some covenant with them. Right. Instead it's just rape. And then what follows from that? 16:44 Erin: Yes. Yeah. So it seems to me, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me then that there's a closer connection in Christianity. No, I mean that the gods are more, or, sorry, the God is more involved in mortal life in Christianity, you know, I mean, there is this connection. I know what you're talking about, but at the same time, like just less. 17:05 Wes: He's just. He's not as sexually active. Should we put it that way? 17:10 Erin: Sure, sure, I see what you mean. I see what you mean. So actively coming in and changing fate in that way. Okay, okay. Because I was gonna say, like, there's. There's also like the personal relationship. There's the. I mean there's no more direct intervention in a way than the incarnation. Right. And. 17:25 Wes: Well, yeah, well, the comparison I was making is that. That's. There's more intent in that. 17:29 Erin: Oh, I see. Okay. 17:31 Wes: And providence. And so God has a plan, there's design to all of this, where for Zeus, it's not about a larger plan for the good of humanity, it's about. It's a plan, but it's a plan about his desire to satisfy his own desires. Yeah, yeah. And then there are cosmic implications for that. But the. They're kind of. But they're not intended. Although, you know, maybe there, There are. I suppose if, yeah. If you looked at Homer and ancient Greek literature, you would say you'd see counter currents to this, this idea because you see the gods sitting around and bickering about their favorite mortals and whether the Greeks are going to win the war and blah, blah, blah. 18:17 Erin: Right. 18:18 Wes: But underneath it all, just because it's so based in the subjectivity of the different gods and their particular, very human, like, desires and opinions, it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't have the same quality as a monotheistic God who is interested in the good, in the fate of humanity in the larger sense. Right. They're not just taking sides, you know. 18:46 Erin: Yes. 18:46 Wes: Ooh, I like Odysseus. Well, I don't like it, you know, there. Or I like the Greeks, I like the Trojans. It's more about the fate of humanity as all a whole. 18:56 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's very well put. I like the psychological closeness because this is the way in which I think, you know, these. These gods are invented, if you like. I mean, I know that there's, like, so much murkiness around this that we can. We can only speculate, but I would imagine that, you know, in trying to come up with a reason why something happened and one attributed it to a God's desire, really it's just some guy's desire, you know. 19:20 Wes: Right. 19:21 Erin: It's the same. The same kind of principle. You know, people behave in this way, and it's because Hitler's mom and dad got together, you know, that Hitler was created. I keep going back to this example. Of course, it's like far more the Schickel. 19:34 Wes: The Schicklgrubers, I think, is the real name. Right. Is that Hitler's real last name? Meet the Schicklgrubers. It's a basis for a really funny sitcom. 19:44 Erin: Oh, God, yeah. Obviously, as. As you said, you know, that's. That's a far more straightforwardly just negative example to give of, you know, of an unfolding which only had negative consequences. But in this case, obviously, it's more. It's like any instance where you have kids and there's going to be some good and some bad and hopefully not. Not too much bad. But. 20:06 Wes: Should we get into the stanzas? 20:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So I. You know what I really love in this first line? So a sudden blow. I'm. You know, that seems to be. Actually, that's. That in itself, the blow is quite. Quite mysterious. I'm almost. Almost thinking of like a wind blowing, but it could also just be like an act of violence. Swans are nasty creatures. 20:28 Wes: So I. Yeah. What's hitting her? 20:32 Erin: Right, Right. 20:33 Wes: Other than the obvious. There's the phallus, there's the wings, there's the beak. I mean, we Hear about the dark webs caressing her thighs, the nape. So he's catching her neck and his bill. But, yeah, he starts out with a blow, but it's left very vague, you know, unless we think she's been hit by the wings. 20:56 Erin: Yeah, it's quite shadowy, what's actually happening. And I think that blow, too, I connect to beating still, which is also a kind of a paradox, right. Like their movement and stillness in the same image. That word still contains, you know, either perpetuation, like it's still moving or it stopped moving. So there's. And that seems to be inherent in this idea of, like, this is almost the sort of the Big Bang, if you will, for the God, for the Trojan War. But it's also. Yeah, I'm sorry, I just got it. Unintentional. It's the singular moment. But then it's also this moment of reverberation, right, that still goes on. So it's sort of like a still image and a moving image at the same time. It's like one scene and every other scene that follows it at the same time. And so that kind of like thunder, fuzziness and the identification with the blow, what's happening where, when it's happening. Seems to me to be. Yeah, very thematic of this event, which sort of, like, happened and did not happen at the same time. Something of that intangibility is being expressed, I think, in the description. 22:09 Wes: Yeah. So there's some ambiguity here between. Famously, between rape and seduction. And so that becomes a question about power and the kind of power that's being deployed here. Right. So one can use brute force, but one can use seduction in the sense of appealing to desire. And sometimes it's the desire for force. But famously, right, Aristotle conceived of God as an unmoved mover. He doesn't push things around in the world by way of. In the same way as material, efficient causes, like us pushing a billiard ball. He is just good. And the world moves because it is moved by the good. To try to be like the good. There's an appeal to. Ultimately to human subjectivity. So here it starts out, right, so she's caught in his bill. And it begins certainly as a rape. And then how can those terrified, vague, vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And then her fingers are vague, but the question is also vague because it's. The question is, can she do it physically? Is this physical force that can be. That's being used and she doesn't have the physical power to resist? Or is it psychological? Force that's being deployed and she can't get herself to actually do this. 23:37 Erin: I mean, it's amazing that this hadn't occurred to me before. But, you know, we have. We have staggering girl. We have helpless breast, you know, so that first stanza seems to indicate the fact that she's being overpowered. And then. But then when we get the mechanics of this in the second stanza, I think to myself, how difficult is it to fight? How big is this swan? And what. 23:56 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. 23:57 Erin: There's. I guess I always conceived of this more straightforwardly, in which it's one of the many. Rape. I mean, sometimes, obviously, Zeus's rapes can be quite brutal and. 24:09 Wes: Well, it's depicted in different ways. Interestingly, you know, in some depictions, she's. I mean, you know, in the visual arts, she's. In some depictions, she's enthusiastically getting it on with the swan. And others, she's obviously being raped. 24:25 Erin: Right. Yeah. 24:29 Wes: Just notice you, you. 24:30 Erin: Yeah, I'm pretty disgusted by this. 24:33 Wes: Disgusted. Is it worse? Which one is worse? The bestiality or the. Yeah, but anyway, she's terrified. But the fingers are also vague, which gives you the idea that. Yeah. What does it mean to have vague fingers? She's not putting all her power into grasping the swan and pulling him away. Something like. Like that. You could really wring it. So you'd think you could just wring Zeus's neck really quickly. 24:59 Erin: Right. 24:59 Wes: Then have some swan for dinner. Right. 25:01 Erin: And they're terrified. They're terrified and vague at the same time. So there's a doubling there. You know, we can compare it to dark webs, which are also, when you think about it, similarly, you know, so there's this idea of when we think of the feet or whatever, you know, the webbed feet of the swan, there's. The dark web. Seems indicative of entrapment. Or if you know something that takes something into itself. Right. You can get entangled in it, but it's also blunted. So is there actually a sort of comparison being established here between the vague fingers and the sort of vague. The blunting. The webbing of the swan. 25:41 Wes: Yeah. That's really good. I hadn't thought about that. Her vague fingers, it sounds like they look like the webbed feet. 25:49 Erin: Right, yeah, well. And I think there's something to that in this not quite knowing where we are and this fuzziness in general. Right. The feathered glory from her loosening thighs. Like that could be. It takes a while to parse this and try to figure out which. And you would think that feathered would give us enough of a clue. But it seems at first maybe almost to be an adjective for her sexual rapture or something like her glory in this moment rather than the actual. The body of the swan itself. I don't know. Like, there's a bit of a confusion, at least on first read. And the white, the white rush, that's very difficult to try and picture. I mean, I'm, you know, also like, trying not to picture this. But it's very, very difficult to figure out what that is and how she would be laid in it. Is that simply just something that's underneath him, that has nothing to do with the bird, but it has to be probably some part of the swan's body. 26:44 Wes: Right. 26:44 Erin: But what kind of tantric position are they in? 26:49 Wes: Yeah. And it occurs to me you could reverse this, right? So you could see this as, you know, he's asking the question of whether how can she but feel his beat, his heart beating? But one might wonder if it's also, how can he but feel her heart beating? I don't know. I'm not that keen on that idea of reversing it, but it just occurred to me. So you get two questions. One is about whether she can push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs. And the other is about whether it's possible to avoid feeling the beating of the heart. So it's a weird type of parallel 27:29 Erin: to make when we get the two, we get laid and lies. Right. So we get this idea that she's laid on the white. If we take this to be, say, like in his feathered wings, she is laid sort of like enclosed or embraced by his body. And then his heart is sort of enclosed within his chest. Right. The strange heart beating where it lies. I mean, that could be on top of her, but also it's sort of inside his chest. In that same way, she's being pulled 28:04 Wes: so close that she's feeling the vitality of the animal, which seems to have. And of course, feeling. And you imagine the heart is beating hard because the swan's excited. Gross. And so she's. She's feeling the excitement, right? She's feeling. She's viscerally connected to the excitement of the animal. So again, it's more suggestive of a seduction and the idea that if she feels the excitement, she might be getting excited, in which case pushing the feathered glory from her loosening thighs. It's not just a matter of her inability to conjure up the physical force, it's an inability to conjure up the will to do that. 28:46 Erin: Yeah. How is such a suggestive question. It makes a bit more sense in this first question. And the second question, it seems like it's just more of a rhetorical device, because, of course. Well, how could she not feel the heart if she's that close to him physically? And that's. I mean, how can she. But that is the. That is the question. But why is it even a question? 29:05 Wes: Because, yeah, I think the idea is. Right. The danger is in tuning into the arousal of the swan and therefore becoming aroused herself. So the tendency would be to shut oneself off psychologically from the arousal, but it's not possible. And this is one of the horrible things about rape, which is, you know, people can be. Right. Pushed into arousal by rape because it lies beyond their will and that there's a trauma just to that. 29:34 Erin: Right. 29:34 Wes: Because you're right, you're invaded at a very deep psychological level. Your instincts are taken over by someone else. 29:42 Erin: Right. But perhaps the how. Because I'm interested just in the, like, why phrase it this way? Why phrase it as a rhetorical question and just say, you know, she can't not feel. I mean, you know, that's a horrible way of putting it. Right. But why not put it in a more declarative manner? It almost seems to. Seems to be inviting us into her conflict. Into this position. Yes, exactly. So we're invited to occupy that ambiguity or ambivalence. 30:09 Wes: She's conflicted, I think, about whether or not to wring his neck and have swan's tooth. 30:17 Erin: That would have saved a lot of problems. 30:19 Wes: Right. Which I might have done. Or. Yeah. To go along with it. Gross. But that's what she did. Yeah, that's. I mean, am I reading that right? That seems to be what the questions invite. They invite us into the idea that she's conflicted. I mean, there are two different parallel ideas. One is that she might be conflicted and she's overcome psychologically. And the other is that. That she's overpowered physically. And the rhetorical questions are just a way of emphasizing the irresistibility of Zeus's physical power. 30:54 Erin: Yeah. I think even. 30:55 Wes: Even when he's in the form of a swan. 30:56 Erin: I think that's exactly right. And I think that leads us into just strange as. As a modifier as well. Because it's a swan's heart. Right. What's so interesting about that word to me is. Is the strangeness because it's an animal? Is it the strangeness because it's a God? 31:13 Wes: Exactly. 31:14 Erin: Could the strange hers, you know, because you could read it as she's feeling her own heart. What makes a heart strange? 31:23 Wes: Her mortal heart must be very strange to him, certainly. 31:27 Erin: And also, as you already have suggested, the identification between God and mortal means that the very desire that is provoking this attack is a human one. And therefore there's nothing strange about this heart at all. There's nothing strange about its motivation to us. 31:42 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. It's alien insofar it's divine, but it's familiar in the sense that the divine is being read through the lens of human desire. 31:53 Erin: It's just got to be the fact that it's a swan heart. That's. 31:56 Wes: Yeah. And then. Yeah, if you read it as the. It's really gross. If you just think, yeah, it's strange. It's a swan's heart. It's really gross. 32:04 Erin: And swan's hearts have seven chambers or. I don't know. I don't know anything about swan's hearts. I'm just making that up. Just imagining it's a very odd organ 32:13 Wes: and they probably beat at three times the rate and, you know, even when they're not excited. 32:18 Erin: Right. 32:21 Wes: So many gross things. But, yeah. You know, and. And this speaks to. Yeah. The concept of physical difference and metamorphosis. 32:29 Erin: Well, you could even say there's sexual difference or the difference between any heart and any other heart. The difference between any person's body and my body is strange. But I like this lies again, actually, the beating, where it lies. There's the beating still, too. So there's this perpetuation and stillness in the same image. 32:48 Wes: Yeah. The wings beating and the heart beating. I didn't notice that. And still and lies. Yeah. You know, and another way of looking at this. Right. Ultimately is these rhetorical questions say something like, you know, can we resist fate? 33:01 Erin: Yes. 33:02 Wes: And I think the other. Other thing to bring in here, because I was thinking about with the fact that the foundational myth for the ancient Greeks is not so much the content of the myth, although it is, you know, so Troy. But the. It's the foundational possession of a shared literary artifact, Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey. And so you can read all of this. Right. As divine inspiration of the poet. It's Homer who got things going. It's Homer who has been impregnated by the divine. So I would just lay that out there as another level here. 33:42 Erin: Sure. Yeah. And then the strangeness would be any kind of inspirational force. Yeah. 33:48 Wes: We could think of those forces in terms of the muses or the divine, more generally. Or the. I guess it's some. Yeah, it's mousa. Andra moi ennepe, mousa is the way the Odyssey begins. Sing to me, Amuse you address her directly. She speaks. Sing to me, but sing in me. Maybe, but likewise, you could just think of that as instinct, or you could think of that as character. Everything that you've laid down in yourself, including your ability as a poet, that gets unleashed in the right moment, gets unleashed, but produces something that has a form, doesn't just produce chaos. You let go. You let instinct do its work, you let desire do its work. You let passion do its work. But it's channeled into something specific and formal and defined. 34:40 Erin: Of course. How could we not think that this is about the poem itself when we have beating still. Right. This is the still object that beats is the poem itself, Right? 34:49 Wes: Oh, yeah, good. 34:50 Erin: The Petrarchan sonnet. 34:52 Wes: And then you can always think of our inability to resist fate in a way as our inability to resist character. We're just ingrained with certain habits that we can't escape dispositions except insofar as we're redeemed, I think aesthetically by taking our character and releasing it into the object, the art object. Maybe there's. In sublimation, there's some sort of redemption for fatedness. And the whole artistic process sort of recapitulates the process of being fated, except that one is free in the sublimated version, in a sense, as opposed to just forced. So, again, we get that ambiguity between being forced and being free. It's free if there's aesthetic. If it's an aesthetic outlet, it's forced. If it's just fate and being. Being overpowered. And so what are the gods doing with us? Have they given us the gift? Have they. Are they Prometheus bringing down the fire or are they just pushing us around? 35:55 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. Hence the. The sort of, like, weedy, you know, the unseparability of those two forces and why it seems at one moment like one and at the other, like the other. That's really interesting. Well, I think. Oh, I hate saying this. I just. I. But I have to say it, that I think that Volta is the. The point of ejaculation. Is that. Right. A shudder in the loins. 36:20 Wes: You don't like saying the word volta. 36:22 Erin: I know it's. It sounds too much like. Thank you. I just. Anything that makes this more picturable to me is disgusting. Yes. 36:36 Wes: What I know from sex ed class. What's going on here? He's impregnating her. I want to make a lot of jokes here, but I'm not going to do it. 36:52 Erin: I'm already turning a little red, so. 36:57 Wes: I thought you were using protection. 37:04 Erin: Yeah, just wait till she finds out she has two sets of twins on 37:07 Wes: the right and they're gonna come out as eggs and I guess her husband's. There's no questions asked about the. Yeah. You're giving birth to eggs. That's weird. They're all yours. Don't worry. They're all yours. Well, I have been seeing you hanging out with a swan down at the tavern. People have been talking. Completely unrelated. So. Yeah. So what's being engendered there is the fate or the. These. These great foundational events for Greek civilization. The broken wall, which I suppose is a rape in and of itself. Right. The Greeks overcoming the Trojans and penetrating the wall and burning everything down and literally raping and murdering all the men and raping all the women and taking 38:04 Erin: them slaves, inspiring the Trojans to use protection ever after. 38:10 Wes: That's great. That's fucking great. That's so perfect. 38:17 Erin: I do. Sorry. 38:22 Wes: So. And the death. And the death also of Agamemnon. Let's not leave that out. Right. 38:26 Erin: Let's not forget that there are two bad women that came out of this justice for Clytemnestra. Yeah. The. The men escape, the other egg escapes, causing all these problems. 38:44 Wes: I mean. Yeah. I think we've already kind of said. 38:47 Erin: Sure. 38:48 Wes: A bit about the meaning of this for Yeats and the possible significance of this in terms of being a foundational event. And, you know, it's a picture of fate in action, this idea of. Right. Impregnating someone with these future events in a way, almost. So it's a very rich idea. And in the end, it'll. He'll ask the question of whether it gives her a premonition, really. Right. Did she put on his knowledge with his power? 39:15 Erin: Yes. 39:16 Wes: Is he giving her knowledge as well? Is he making her a prophet of a kind, or is he just making her the mother of Greek civilization, to put it crudely. 39:27 Erin: Right. Yeah. Being so caught up seems to contradict. I mean, that in itself is a contradictory phrase. Right. She's either caught up, I. E. Trapped by him or caught up in her own. 39:40 Wes: Caught up in the moment, caught up in her desire. 39:43 Erin: Response. Sure. And then that seems to be. That also seems to be resisting at any rate. What. Regardless of the reading we give that it seems to resist this idea of knowledge. To be caught up in something seems to resist conscious Awareness outside of the immediate physical moment, whether that be one of struggles or one of desire, excitement, whatever the case may be, like that emotion seems to work in contrast. 40:08 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting because one might also read this as her understanding the significance of union with Zeus. Right. So that she might have known as things progressed what this was all about. She might have known that this was about the burning roof and tower in some sense. Right. So one question is, was she so caught up in the moment and the desire that this fated future didn't enter into her consciousness at all after the fact. After the fact of the shudder of the loins? But the other is, the other question is, did she succumb to the swanne merely out of desire? Did she sort of know was part of, in other words, was part of her arousal and, and being overcome? And was part of that about a kind of instinctual grasp of the significance of all of this? And I suppose, you know, hopefully she at least knew it wasn't just a swan. 41:11 Erin: Right? 41:11 Wes: Right. 41:13 Erin: Yeah. The emotion seems crucial. Like strangely, this being caught up seems crucial to the knowledge. Like the way that this is constructed. We have this idea of being caught up and being mastered as actually being signals that she perhaps did have this knowledge. Right. Because it's not. Yeah, it's not. Did she not put on his knowledge with his power? It's that these two things are somehow evidence for the fact that she put on his knowledge with his power. I mean, I know it's a question, so that's ambiguous in and of itself, but they seem dependent. Like this is evidence that perhaps she did. Right. There's no negative in the construction. So that she did put on his knowledge with his power. So this, this is the strange sort of knowledge that's being suggested here, which is by being mastered by him, in other words, subject to him and also having this emotional experience, this is somehow giving way, Right. To this deeper knowledge of whatever is engendered, which is to say like the potential result of any sexual experience. Right. Like there's a sort of. There are different types of knowledge, I suppose, and whether this suggests a sort of ancestral bodily knowledge or something else. 42:24 Wes: How do you mean ancestral? 42:26 Erin: Well, you know, the idea of just what you're saying, she, that she knew this was going to happen or she knew that this was Zeus. 42:32 Wes: Yeah. The options are she, hey, it's a swan. It's a sexy swan. It's just a swan. The next one up is, well, this is a special swan. I definitely would not have sex with just any old swan. This is special. Next one up from there. Okay. It's God, right? I would not feel this way about a swan if it weren't God. And then the next level is, hey, this is a mother of the future. This is my chance. 43:04 Erin: Yeah, so. So you're saying that perhaps she did know that she was. That she was engendering the future. And I would say in that same way, any sexual encounter or any, Any desire, like even. Even before the sexual encounter has the potential to engender some kind of new future, I think is what I'm trying to say. And is that in itself a kind of a knowledge? Is that like a bodily knowledge? You know, I'm thinking of like, whatever. Anything from sort of like genes being expressed. Right. Merely the idea of sexual desire and drive as this sort of the world or humanity itself perpetuating itself into the future through us. Therefore, like, do our bodies have some sort of knowledge that we don't necessarily consciously have? You know what I'm saying? I'm trying to connect this maybe to something. Something that goes back to this kind of pre mythological idea for which the Greeks presumably then came up with the mythology to explain. 44:06 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we. We normally think of sexual desire as distinct from the desire to propagate. Even though, of course, evolutionarily sexual desire is there because it, because it facilitates propagation. 44:20 Erin: Yes, yes. It's primordial. 44:23 Wes: Human beings can want to propagate consciously, unlike animals. 44:27 Erin: Yes, yes. 44:28 Wes: Animals are just following their instincts or desires. And then the question is, well, to, to what extent does that desire to propagate feed into sexual desire, consciously or unconsciously? And to what extent is arousal a premonition of a twist of fate, of an alteration of the future? So we might, on some unconscious level. In other words, even if we're not intending to have kids, we might be aroused at an unconscious level by the possibility of a new future. Maybe. I don't know if that's the idea, but you're trying to get at. 45:05 Erin: Yeah, and I wonder too, if the world, you know, if it feels as though the world is. I mean, these are the forces that push the world forward, whether we're. Whether we're conscious of them or not. You know, and so this is just. What if we look, if we zoomed out and looked at this on this kind of macro level. We can almost argue that like we are the. That our individual reproductive happenings, occurrences are like the world sort of working out its own plan in which we are less than conscious participators, but which we might have some sort of insight into or like people talk about. I don't mean to be so mystical with this, but I think that people talk about this when they have kids that like the world finally made sense to them, right? Because they were participating in some sort of. They were collaborating in some sort of vast project that they prior to this did not have access to, but which we might say looking back, they were participating in that higher knowledge even before they had the knowledge or before they were conscious of having the knowledge. Do you know what I'm trying to say? I'm being very woo woo about this just very simple idea of just having kids. I'm perhaps putting too fine a point on something which is just very easily said, which is just that any kind of child is a new possibility. And when you have a child or when you conceive a child, you're sort of participating in the kind of the knowledge of the world or the knowledge of the future which you don't fully know that know yet, but what you know is perhaps like you're affecting the future in some way and you're affecting the world in some way. And that seems to be a sort of subterranean knowledge which is at the base of any child that's born. I don't know. 46:44 Wes: I think I get it. 46:46 Erin: Do you? Because I don't. 46:48 Wes: I should say, since I took us down this path, this kind of alternative reading, that the straightforward reading is just that the question is about whether when, at the point where she's being inseminated, is she with his power, which is to say his seed, right? And power is potentiality with the thing that's going to open up this new future, whether she also, whether a premonition follows on that or some kind of knowledge. Zeus is, and Zeus read, is presumably omniscient in some sort of way. So. And then you could ask the same thing of the poet, whether the poet is taking on divine knowledge in some sense, when, at the moment of being engendered, inspired. The reading that we're toying with is this idea of premonition that goes back to the beginning of the encounter and explains to some extent why she's agreeing to the encounter. I just wanted to be clear about that for listeners who. Why are they talking about. Yeah, sure. 47:45 Erin: And to that more baseline reading, you know, there's also the idea of sex is knowing someone right in the. In the biblical way that one receives some knowledge of a person through sexual encounter. And that therefore, if through sex one truly comes to know another person on some level. Which again could be, could be sort of mystical, I suppose, or one has knowledge of that other person which is intimate and if that other person is a God, then do you have that, then do you become invested with some kind of divine knowledge by virtue of that encounter? Which is again, I think like pretty straightforward, but maybe, maybe is enriched by this idea of like knowing on a. In the sexual way, which I think he's sort of toying with here from a different tradition. 48:33 Wes: Why the brute blood of the air? That's something I don't quite understand. 48:39 Erin: Yeah. 48:39 Wes: Mastered by the brute blood of the air. I mean, unless we think of the swan as a representative of the life of the air divinity. 48:49 Erin: I mean, I don't think of swans as being in the air at all, you know. 48:53 Wes: Well, he's flapping his wings so you kind of get the idea that he's. Yeah. 48:56 Erin: Hovering a bit. 48:58 Wes: Hovering a bit. But probably not for long. 49:01 Erin: Right, right. 49:01 Wes: It's hard to have sex that way, Wings flapping, all this. Yeah. We don't associate swans. Yeah. With being in the air. That's a good point. Mastered by the brute blood of the air. 49:14 Erin: The contrast too perhaps is inherent in this idea of the, you know, the divinity who is a brute, who operates according to his own appetites. Yeah. But it's this sort of mixing of the elemental. Right. Because we have brute blood which is sort of earth and then air at the same time. 49:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean we can think of brood in terms of. Yeah. The mere animality or the brutishness of Zeus's desire. 49:39 Erin: Yeah. 49:39 Wes: You know, I think we can associate the air with the gods, but the blood part I think is. 49:46 Erin: Yeah. The blood is so instantiated. It's such a strange. 49:51 Wes: And the question again, you know. Right. So she, the questions are always double. So is she mastered by the carnality or the physicality of this thing or is she mastered by her own hot bloodedness, let's say. But just the whole phrase together, I don't quite, don't quite get it. 50:08 Erin: Well, this is. I suppose we just have to relate this back to the beating and to the heart. Right. So it's the blood that's. That's pumping, that's actually operating all of this. So that's the force somehow at the bottom of the experience. 50:22 Wes: Yeah. 50:23 Erin: I don't know. I wish there was something more I could. 50:25 Wes: No, that helps. Relating it back to the heart. 50:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And then we get the indifferent beak, which is the, maybe the cruelest part of this whole poem. 50:34 Wes: Yeah. He never called her. He yeah, exactly. She gave him her number, but he never called her. The indifferent beak. 50:45 Erin: What a player. 50:47 Wes: So, yeah, he's just off, back off to Mount Olympus to slam, bam, thank you, Leda. 50:54 Erin: Yeah, and beak too. Like there's a poem. So it's words, but there are no words exchanged, of course, between Swan, you know, can the swan even talk? And yet beakiness seems suggestive of a mouth of words. And the idea of an indifferent beak means he's not going to call her, he's not going to speak to her. Right. There's a sort of refusal of communication. 51:19 Wes: Yeah. And brute, right? Yeah, the brutes are mute. There's always that association with the brutishness of the animals, the fact that they can't speak. 51:27 Erin: Yes, they're dumb. 51:29 Wes: Speechless. Yeah. So I like that. Yeah. This, I mean, the indifference, right? Yeah. We can read it as the indifference of animality, of, you know, of being less than human. We can read it as the indifference of the divine as being more than human. Right. So our human affairs are not the concern of the gods in a way, which is a special irony because, of course, the momentous things that follow from this union of the men, you know, and then there's the indifference of this post coital indifference. Right. Where arousal and excitement are gone and one enters a radically different world after orgasm psychologically. So there's a kind of malaise post coital malaise, let's say. So I think of those three things, 52:20 Erin: Swan's gotten what it wanted. 52:23 Wes: That wraps up part three of our four part series on Yeats. Next we're gonna do the Indian to his love for part four. [email protected] subtextpodcast or you can just. If you're using Apple Podcasts, you can just hit the subscribe button right on Apple and listen to that immediately. Otherwise, you can wait a week and listen to the next part. 52:48 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity. Upcoming Episodes: Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and “The Indian to His Love,”; “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Yeats sailing to Byzantium. We got through Stanzas 1 and 2 last time. Got to talk about those young people, 0:46 Erin: young people today and every day, 0:51 Wes: and what we should be doing with our time as we get older, which is going to the opera or something, going to classical music concerts with all the other older old people singing. Singing about our tatters. All right, so do you want to read Stanza 3? 1:08 Erin: Sure. 3 O sages standing in God's holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall. Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre and be the singing masters of my soul. Consume my heart away sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. It knows not what it is and gather me into the artifice of eternity. 1:35 Wes: Okay, this stanza, I think, is a bit codependent. 1:40 Erin: Yes. 1:41 Wes: Well, this is a little bit. Yeah, the more moderate view, I think, in the fourth stanza. And I'm kind of relying on Helen Vendler's interpretation here. But this is quite extreme, right? Yeah. 1:52 Erin: Yes. 1:52 Wes: Because he's going to end up as a bird. Right. He's going to end up in a different situation than he is hoping for here in the third stanza where he's talking about having his very heart consumed by a holy fire. 2:07 Erin: Right. So this is the pre Nelly Furtado stanza. 2:15 Wes: I actually like that song. I actually like that song. 2:19 Erin: Really? 2:20 Wes: Something about it. It's so dumb. But it's just about how she wants to cheat on the person that she's with. Right. 2:28 Erin: I'd have to. 2:29 Wes: I'm a bird who's gonna fly away. It's not my fault. It's just what birds do. Or. 2:33 Erin: Oh, is that. Yeah, that's right. 2:35 Wes: Is really what that's about. That is. So she's one of the dying generations of young people. 2:40 Erin: I highly recommend just not listening to song lyrics from the early aughts. 2:45 Wes: Listen, there's more than one fish in the mackerel-crowded seas. Sometimes there's five, sometimes there's ten. It depends on. But 2:56 Erin: that's pretty good. I mean, this is what I wanted to say in the last part, but I would be jumping the gun. This is where I get the sense that Byzantium is actually just the underworld. Right. Or the land of the dead. Am I wrong about that? Right. Because that's what I wanted to say is that the. 3:10 Wes: You know, That's a good point. Yeah. There's a Hades like quality maybe to it, but yeah. 3:16 Erin: And because he has to go there, he has to make the Odyssey, he has to perform the Katabasis and go into the underworld. And this is an essential part of any artistic learning, right? You have to visit the. You have to visit the dead. You have to go back in time. You have to follow something to its source to be able to understand the monuments of magnificence. So there's a competing, I suppose, locus of attention. Because I think in the previous part, I was arguing that all one has to do is listen to and then reproduce the sensual music in order to come up with a monument of unaging intellect. And of course, that's only half true. 3:58 Wes: Right. 3:58 Erin: Because they're also monuments of their own magnificence. So one has to be aware of the sensual music and of the tatters in one's own dress, Right. Or in other words, of the material right in front of one. The landscape that one is going to paint. That's important. But one also has to know all the other landscapes that have ever been painted, you know, all the long tradition of landscape painting, the long tradition of this, like, refraction into art. So one's attention is actually pulled away from the immediate sensual reality and into this kind of. To the tradition, to, you know, one's attention is actually pulled away from the present and into the past. And the balance of that seems important, which, if I'm understanding you correctly, the third is the furthest point from that balance. So this is where he gets sucked into the tradition, the past. Is that what you were implying? I'm just kind of trying to figure out what that could mean. 4:58 Wes: Yeah. And I'm not going to be able to relay exactly what Helen Vendler says about this, so I'm just influenced by her view. But in the second stanza, we learn that he's right. So to become an artist, he's gonna have to study the great art of the past, which I think is what you've just been talking about. Your focus goes to the past in a way. So, I mean, this is the interesting thing. It's about the object of art, right. Is the sensual music. Right. So you make music that's about sensual music. But you have to do it by making the sensual music of the past also your object. 5:36 Erin: Yes. 5:37 Wes: So why does it have to be so complicated? So it's like you want to play the blues. You have to listen to a lot of blues music and learn from it. And I prefer to play it rather than to actually listen to it. But that's what you have to do. You have to. Yeah, go ahead. 5:54 Erin: Well, no, and it seems like a very immediate reaction to a bad thing that's happened to you. Right. So it seems like it should be connected. Like it seems like there should be a straight line in the blues between, you know, woke up this morning, I was feeling bad. You know, like it should. Seems like it should just be this like direct recapitulation of experience. And in fact it is a like a highly regulated form which is based on a long tradition of people waking up and feeling really bad. 6:24 Wes: And you spend 20 years trying to learn how to bend properly, for instance, and you realize that, oh, I thought I knew how to bend on a guitar string, but I was doing it wrong. 6:37 Erin: Yep, yep. 6:37 Wes: Or I thought I was playing cleanly, but I'm not playing cleanly. You know, there's a lot of palm muting and other stuff you have to do, especially if you're using distortion. 6:46 Erin: Yeah. The number one thing you learn in singing is that like 99% of people don't even know how to breathe properly. 6:51 Wes: Exactly. Right. That's what I Learned in the one singing lesson. 6:55 Erin: Yes. 6:55 Wes: YouTube video that I watch. It's like breathing is the most important thing. But so. 6:59 Erin: Yeah. 6:59 Wes: So there's so much effort and rehearsal that goes into making something expressive where you want it to be expressive in some natural way. In some way you want it to be a recapitulation of the sensual. The unconscious, sensual music. But it has to be so. It has to be preceded by so much study and self consciousness. 7:22 Erin: Yes. 7:22 Wes: And perfecting one's craft and. Right. And has lots of rules and you know, there are scales and things like that. It's not just a free for all. But in this case. Right. He's talking about becoming the art object here. He's going to be gathered. This sounds like a fantasy of. 7:40 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 7:42 Wes: Joining the sages in the mural, which I take to be saints. 7:47 Erin: Yeah, they would have to be. 7:49 Wes: So. Yeah, so there's this gold mosaic on the, on a wall and you can, you know, you can look up images of the mosaics at Ravenna. So you pronounce Ravenna. 7:59 Erin: Yes. 8:00 Wes: And see what he's talking about. And you know, if you haven't been to places like that. So fantasy is that. Well, it sounds like, okay, they come from the holy fire, which I take to be the gold inlay or the background. And then they come out perne in a gyre. One of his favorite words. So they're twisting and turning. Be the singing masters of his soul. So they've come alive. But then he's going to be what he's going to learn in this. Right. So they've become his teachers at the point where they seem to emerge from the mural, but they are going to. He's already tatters, but now he's going to have whatever flesh is on him consumed away by the fire. And it sounds like, become part of the mural, be gathered into the artifice of eternity, so become the monument as opposed to produce the monument. 8:54 Erin: Right. And this is where I see a. You know, I mean, certainly Grecian urn is all over the first stanza, as you've already suggested. But this is really where I see nightingale being the primary key to informing this. Right. Like that I might leave the world unseen and with the fade away into the forest, dim, fade far away, dissolve and quite forget. Right. So the nightingale here is replaced with these sages in the wall. But the idea of like losing the self in the. What in Keats is the voice of the nightingale, the voice of poetry itself, the sort of eternal song. Right. That Ruth in the alien corn was listening to and the magic casements. Right. So there's this quality of eternality expressed by the nightingale, sor. Which here is being expressed by the sages, which is an interesting contrast. Right. Because the nightingale song, it represents the song that all the other nightingales have sung and therefore it's kind of connected to it, to an artistic tradition. But here sages is far more. This is far more intellectualized. This is not the unconscious bird song. This is the. The peak of self consciousness and the pursuit of the intellectual and of these higher order concerns which would be lost on the nightingale. But the fact that they're both still connected back to the sensual music is, I think with Yeats, as with Keats, we can never be far away really from the body. So the fact that he wants his body to be burned away seems to me to be. To make this like an extreme stanza in terms of what you had mentioned before. Yeah. 10:44 Wes: Sick with desire. Right. We think of desire and having a heart as probably essential to being a singing master. 10:53 Erin: Right. 10:54 Wes: It's interesting because he's, O sage, is standing in God's holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall. So he's not starting with the literal gold mosaic in the wall and then moving to the fantasy of the sages and saying, oh, that's like sages in God's holy fire. He's doing the reverse. 11:14 Erin: Right, Right. 11:15 Wes: What we expect him to encounter in Byzantium is the gold mosaic of a wall, and then he can do with that what he wants. But here he's, you know, within the frame of the poem, he's literally encountering these whirling banshees emerging from a fire. 11:29 Erin: Oh, that's good. Yeah. Because it gives primacy to the art object, actually, you know. 11:35 Wes: Right. So in a way, he's already in it. He's identified with it. Be the singing masters of my soul. It's interesting that what you get from the sages is dancing. We don't see them explicitly sing. 11:48 Erin: Yes. They're whirl. There's the whirling dervish element here. Right. Yeah. Because they're turning. That too, is reminiscent of the urn. Right. The thing in 3D space. I mean, I have a lot that I could say about that, which I won't get into here because I don't think it's quite being. There's quite as close of a connection. But the idea of the 3D object or something turned 3D is really important in the history of ekphrasis. So the idea that the figures in the gold mosaic are actually turning somehow with that. Yeats is making a connection to roundness as part of the cyclical nature of life and of this country of the young. Yeah. It's very subtle, I think, but I think there is a connection that he's making there between these sages, who seem disconnected from that, and the gyre, which is intimately connected to the sensual music. The country of the young, the country of country music. Who's a country music singer? Toby. Toby somebody. So these sages are just like that guy. Anyway. Can't even think of anybody. Patsy Cline is the closest I come. 12:59 Wes: Johnny Cash. 13:00 Erin: Johnny Cash. There you go. 13:01 Wes: Yeah. For good country. Let's not even think about contemporary country. 13:05 Erin: Yeah, I never. Patsy Cline's great. 13:08 Wes: That's all. Yeah. So consume my heart away Sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. So consuming desire, really. He wants to be rid of desire and rid of the body Again, this sounds like a more philosophical enterprise. This is someplace. Socrates famously compares philosophy to dying. Because ultimately you're trying to focus yourself on these eternal truths or forms that one cannot get at in the world of becoming. Knowledge in the world and becoming in the world of becoming are in a way inconsistent. One must in a way die to truly know. To truly. We get to the. To the forms, so to speak. 13:52 Erin: But also, this is. This seems to be connected to like. One can then go back and read the first stanza with quite a bit of. I don't want to. Like, anger is too strong, but bitterness. Yeah, right. Sick with desire. Like he's. Even though he's an old man on a stick, a tattered coat Upon a stick. He still has at least this envy for the young, which means that he's still plagued by his body's. What's the word? Imperatives. He's still sort of tortured by the sensual music, even though he's gotten away from. So the sensual music is inside you. The call is coming from inside the house. 14:29 Wes: Yeah. I think early drafts make it clear that kind of the impetus for this poem is he wrote it when he was 60. Part of the impetus is sexual desire or feelings of sexual frustration or something like that. Or maybe even impotence. Sexual impotence. And no longer. However you want to take it, but no longer as fully engaged with that sexual world of the young and being bitter about it and seeing art as an alternative. 15:03 Erin: Well, as we all know, Yeats wrote his best stuff from here on in. Late Yeats is the best Yeats so at all. He bins out. 15:13 Wes: So he succeeded. 15:14 Erin: He did succeed. 15:16 Wes: He got to Byzantium in the end. 15:18 Erin: Yes. Of course he had to go through all the other. All the other countries first. Otherwise we don't get. We don't get the great late unless we have the striving early. 15:31 Wes: Right. Okay. So I think in the Right. Gather me into the artifice of eternity. Something a bit different is going to happen in the fourth stanza. Do you want to read it? 15:41 Erin: Yes. 4. Once out of Nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enameling to keep a drowsy emperor awake. Or set upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come. This is where I got my idea of the underworld. I knew there was an even better reason and it was the golden bough. Duh. Okay. 16:19 Wes: Right. 16:21 Erin: That's what happens when the fourth stanza is on page two. 16:25 Wes: So we seem to come backward a little bit more from the. And this is, I guess, why the. The dual nature of Byzantium is kind of perfect for this, but a retreat from the Christian to the classical maybe, or to the Greco, when now we're talking about emperors and Grecian goldsmiths instead of the sages or the saints. And it's no longer that he's gonna. It doesn't. Right. That his heart is going to be consumed away and that he's going to be gathered into the artifice of eternity. He does become a. He becomes a gold bird. So take that birds in stanza one, you dying generations. He gets to have it all he's going to be a bird and he's going to be eternal. But he's still singing, right? He doesn't end up in a wall. Yes, it's better. It's a better fate. 17:19 Erin: Yeah. I mean, he becomes the art object itself, right? So if the idea is to take the sensual music and make it permanent somehow, there's no better, I guess, image of that than an automaton bird, a golden bird making an eternal mating call. But what I love about this and what made me almost laugh out loud reading it is, you know, the idea that you're still. What's it all for? Well, it's just to keep a drowsy emperor awake. So, you know, as usual, you have to make your. Your. Even when you're a golden bird in this like idealized situation, you have to. Have to find some patron to make it all, make it all possible. You're still, you're still dependent on someone's patronage who maybe doesn't really appreciate you. 18:08 Wes: But keeping a drowsy emperor awake so very much in the realm of the sensual. Yes, very much in the realm of this world, still. The drowsy emperor. The emperor who's drowsy because he's over glutted at a feast or because he's bored, you know, and probably bored because he's over gratified or over. Or it's post orgasmic or however you want to put it, right? This idea of being drowsy, it's not just a matter of, oh, it's evening and it's time to go to bed. He's being induced with drowsiness by too much pleasure, I think, and so too much sensual pleasure. And so the goal is to reanimate the emperor to wake him back up to life. 19:00 Erin: Oh yeah, I like that. 19:02 Wes: By singing. Yeah. So this is, you know, as a poet, what you can do. And so this is no longer just about becoming, you know, a monument of unaging intellect and a monument of its own magnificence. And it's timeless and it's this and that. It has implications for life. It wakes people up within life and to life. And so it's not all shits and giggles for the, for the birds and the trees, right? They. Hedonism, in other words, can be its own kind of death in life. And the artistic is not. It's not just another hedonism, right? It's not just another sensual pleasure. It's something different. 19:43 Erin: That's a much more positive reading of this than I had. I thought it was just like, you know, instead of because he's wealthy, he has the. This great example of, you know, this great monument of magnificence singing to him instead of playing Candy Crush on his phone in bed. He's. 20:03 Wes: I mean, I think there is a place for that, for that reading. I mean, it does. It seems it's kind of a ignoble fate. Humiliating compared to his ambitions, right? It's kind of humiliating. He's just a toy or it sounds like he's a toy. Do you ever see Clash of the Titans, where long Athena's owl is just this, like, little robot. 20:25 Erin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 20:27 Wes: Which I always thought was kind of interesting. So, yeah, he's a little fake bird and he's in the possession of someone with a lot of power. Maybe he's even a trinket. And he's there for the pleasure of the emperor, who probably can't even fully appreciate what he's doing. And yeah, I think that's a perfectly natural reading. But the more optimistic reading is that there's work, right? There's real. We're real work to do as the singer for those who are living. And so, right, he's no longer simply. He's still in Byzantium in a sense, but he's no longer simply in the country of old men. He's back here with the young, doing something for the young, which is humiliating in a way, but that's the task 21:13 Erin: when he's doing something for power, as you've already suggested. Right, yeah. So something about what he does gives. I love this idea that he lends a kind of alertness which seems like a. You know, too with the lords and ladies. Like, he's, he's. He's shaping the future of, of the country that he's in, in a small way. By being the gold canary in the coal mine or something. No, he's, he's, he's. He's. He's warning people or he's giving them a sense of perspective, right? And he's also kind of prodding them awake. So he's, he's prodding them to pay more attention somehow. So he's moving the needle slightly, right? 21:54 Wes: He's singing about what is past or passing or to come. So, right, this is again, back to the world of becoming. In the first stanza, he's singing about becoming. So as opposed to simply fleeing to the world of being and becoming pure, static, unchanging being. And the object of his art is becoming, as you've already pointed to this, right, so however timeless the Poem might be, it's right, the song, its primary object is the sensual music. So the primary object here, he's in a more realistic position where he understands that his poetry has to have content of some kind. And the content is going to be this world of becoming and its audience is going to be in the world of becoming. These lords and ladies have replaced the teenagers listening to rock and roll in the first stanza, the more dignified version of those libertines in the first stanza. And they are the audience for what he's doing. He's not just going to say, screw you young people, I'm off to Byzantium. But he's going to be engaged with this younger generation. And so it's not just that he's leaving something for future generations in a monument, but influencing. Although you could read it that way, I guess. I guess at the point where he's become a gold bird on a bough, he literally is dead. And that's what's left is his poetry for posterity. I guess you could. 23:28 Erin: Yeah. But he becomes a propagandist for the monuments of unaging intellect. Right, right. Yeah. Which in a way is like all poetry is sort of propaganda for poetry. So what I'm getting from this is that you're saying that there's a. That this is a sort of a different. This isn't necessarily. Oh, no, it is Byzantium. Okay. Yeah, because it is. Yeah. It's like in part three, he goes to Catholic school and in part four, he graduates and goes on to work for the. Work. For the, you know, work in the Trump administration or whatever. Oh, my God, I didn't want to go there, but there it is. 24:07 Wes: Well, who's. Yeah, the Trump. The emperor. Yeah. So God, can you imagine? 24:13 Erin: He's trying to warn J.D. vance of what's passing and what's happening. 24:17 Wes: That is a very dark. A dark ending for this poem. It would be a very, very dark ending. 24:22 Erin: Sorry, I shouldn't have gotten political there. It was just a joke. 24:25 Wes: But yeah, he's a great poet. He's an amazing poet. 24:28 Erin: The best poet in the world. We have all the best gold birds. 24:30 Wes: Best poet ever. Because he's American. 24:34 Erin: Our gold birds are gonna kill and eat all of China's goldbirds. What? No. 24:40 Wes: Well, they are AI driven gold birds. That's realistic. Yeah. 24:46 Erin: That's where we should be putting all our money. 24:47 Wes: Little robot gold plated robot birds producing poetry on the fly using artificial intelligence. That actually could easily be a real thing. 25:00 Erin: Yep. 25:01 Wes: This is an idea. This is something we could sell Yeats 25:03 Erin: Corp, started right here, people on Amazon. 25:06 Wes: They'd be like plastic, but they'd be gold colored plastic little robot birds. And then you have like singing random artificial intelligence produced by Otra in the style of Yeats. 25:24 Erin: There we go. 25:25 Wes: But not actual Yeats poems, but completely extemporaneous. The future is really horrific. 25:31 Erin: Yeah, it is. 25:31 Wes: All right, so this is part of what we're saying is relevant because he is speaking, he is singing about what is to come as well, not just what's past or passing. It seemed like in the first stanza it's all about the past, but now it's about the present, this world, what's happening, what's passing and what will be. So there's perhaps a prophetic element to it. 25:54 Erin: What do we make of the goldsmiths? So it seems like there are multiple layers of, I want to say apprenticeship, but that's sort of not like too apt of a word. Right, but he has to learn from. Right, he has to. It's important that he come from the country of the young. So it's important that he go through the sensual music. So that's kind of like one step in the, the Yeats poetic car wash, right? Like first he has to get sprayed down by the country of the young and then he has to go through the, the scrub. A dub machine of the, of, of the sages in the, in the holy fire. Or maybe, maybe, maybe he has to make the journey right to Byzantium so that. And then, then there's the sages. But then he has to be fashioned or, or he says such a kind as Grecian goldsmiths make. So he's, he's making comparison. Maybe he's self fashioned, but it seems like there is a. 26:46 Wes: He says such a form as Grecian, 26:47 Erin: such a form as Grecian goldsmiths. 26:50 Wes: That's kind of ambiguous, an ambiguous term. It could mean kind or it could mean the particular form of the object. 26:56 Erin: Right? Yeah, but something about being hammered into shape here still. Again, he's making a comparison. So, but, well, we're still. 27:05 Wes: So we still have gold, right, you know, as in the third stanza, but it's no longer fire, it's no longer a holy fire. And it is, as you pointed out, a three dimensional object which is an improvement over two dimensional eternality, eternity in a wall. And it's dynamic. He's not just static on a wall, but he can sing. But yeah, he is something that's been fashioned. And of course we could read that as he's fashioned as a Poet. By the influence of previous poets, which is the whole point of studying monuments. Right. Of its own magnificence. 27:45 Erin: Right. 27:46 Wes: To acquire that influence and to be shaped into the artist that he is. So there is this weird sense in which the artist is an art, also an art product, maybe. 27:58 Erin: Right. And something about the goldsmith and the sage together has to. There's something. Something of a different variety of apprenticeship expressed in those two. 28:09 Wes: This is far less grandiose. Right? 28:11 Erin: Yeah. 28:12 Wes: He is a product of a craft. Right. A craftsperson. 28:16 Erin: Right. 28:17 Wes: As opposed to someone who's been integrated into the. With. Into these. With these sages taught by the sages in a way, but become one of them. You could read three as kind of like, yeah, this has gone to his head a little bit. And then four, it's a little less grandiose. 28:39 Erin: No, I think you need all of them. You need the sensual, so you need the sort of like the bodily, personal experience, et cetera. Then you need this sort of like intellectual education. And then you need something practical, whether that be like just a representative of 28:55 Wes: discipline, which is representative of them. 28:57 Erin: The goldsmith taking the spun gold or something of the sages and actually applying it to some sort of practical application. So if the personal experience is perhaps too low and the sages are perhaps too high, I think you're already saying, right, this is something sort of in the middle that balances the two or that coalesces the two into something which is artisanal but practical. 29:22 Wes: 90% of it is just showing up to your job. 29:25 Erin: That's right. That's right. 29:27 Wes: And you just do it every day. And it's a job. And you're a craftsperson and you're not Shakespeare. 29:34 Erin: Well, Shakespeare showed up every day too. You know, you can't be precious about it. You can use precious metals, but you can't be precious about the precious metals 29:44 Wes: or something very good. Yeah. So less grandiose, more. More of a workman like attitude toward all of this. Perfectly willing to be right. The plaything of an emperor and to be there for the lords and ladies and the emperor, as opposed to someone who simply escaped this world. I've said this before, but I think that grandiose moment, maybe that's essential, or the manic moment that he has in stanza three. There might be. It might be something that you can't really do away with in artistic inspiration, but you also can't do away. Most people get stuck there, frankly, and they don't move beyond it. And they don't move beyond it in the sense that they don't end up with that workaday do it every day attitude because it's imbued with too much significance. Right. This eternal significance, that's too fraught, maybe. So the movement to this point of humility, which I think is a lot of what this is about with the emperor, you know, the position of humility is really important. 30:56 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I think most people are stuck at one. I mean, most people don't care enough to get to three. Right. And that's a much better way to be. 31:05 Wes: Oh, I want to be, you know, this or that. I want to be a poet. I want to be a. Yeah. Musician. 31:12 Erin: I have a friend who was telling me, oh, gosh, I hope. I hope he's okay that I tell this story. It's not. No one will recognize themselves in it. But after reading in my program, someone. Someone came up to him and said, like, I guess this person is always attending these readings and then saying, oh, I wish that I, like, you know, wrote more and more, participating more in the literary scene around here, whatever. And my friend was, like, so exhausted from whatever he had been working on that day and so embittered by what he had been working on that he didn't. He didn't mean to say this in such a way as to slight this poor woman, but he was like, yeah, 10 or 15 years of misery and all this can be yours, or something like that. And she was very taken aback, and he felt embarrassed, but he was also trying to call attention to the fact that it was this, like, dinky little reading anyway. 32:09 Wes: Yeah, no, it makes sense. 32:10 Erin: Yeah. But there's a lot of. That captures it perfectly. There are a lot of people that come up to you at these things and are like, oh, I want to be a poet. 32:17 Wes: Yeah. I am one of those people, you know, wish I wish I could have done that. 32:22 Erin: Wow. 32:22 Wes: But I get stuck, so. And the thing that, you know, I didn't get stuck doing was the Partially Examined Life. Because it. Right. My philosophy podcast, because it's collaborative because I have to show up for that, because I'm called upon to perform. So it's good structure. So you make a necessity out of it. You impose some strictures on yourself, and then you have to do it. But different from being a right. Professional philosopher and writing, doing the very, very hard work of writing and publishing and all that. 32:58 Erin: The third part, too, it's a manic moment, but it's also. I mean, it's a fantasy. It's not real. He's making it real in the poem. But actually it's in the imperative mood. So he's commanding them to do this. But it's not as though it actually happens. Right. It's not as though one can be consumed by some sort of abstract holy fire. 33:22 Wes: This is a really good point. This is all just expressed as a wish. 33:26 Erin: Right, Right. 33:27 Wes: Doesn't actually happen. And then. But then his intent changes in four. But. 33:32 Erin: Sorry, yeah. What is that reminiscent of? Like the lie of the manic moment? The thing that you're after or the thing even. That in your moment of most intensity, you think you're actually in. You're not in it at all. It's not real. It's like a dream. You wake up from it and you're still yourself. You still have a body. You haven't been consumed by a mosaic, probably. I mean, I don't want to speak to everybody's personal experience, but it's never happened to me. 33:57 Wes: So you haven't been doing the right drugs. 34:01 Erin: I know, I know. I've seen some things on NyQuil, I gotta say. But. 34:08 Wes: No, but it's not a bad drug. 34:11 Erin: No, but you know what I mean. Like, there's a. What you're describing that people get stuck in. In three isn't anything with any kind of stuff. Stickiness at all. It's. It's a matter of perception. It's a matter of. You know what I'm trying to say. Do you or do I. Am I not making any sense? 34:27 Wes: Stickiness. 34:29 Erin: Oh, what, that's not clear enough for you? No. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't even happen in this poem. Never mind in. 34:35 Wes: Yeah. 34:36 Erin: There is no state of being in. In three. In three. The way that we're talking about three. Right. Like it doesn't exist. It's not possible. And so, you know, there is no state. There is no. In a way, there is no Byzantium. There is a Byzantium of the mind and of the. I mean, maybe that's the genius of sort of like naming it this outdated term. Right. Because it had. Byzantium only lives on in books, in. In these monuments of unaging intellect. We have this. This apprenticeship which is. Or. Which happens in the mind of. Which is not actually happening out in the real world. And so in three, he's. He's. It's still not even happening in three. He's asking it to happen, but it's not happening. 35:18 Wes: Well, there's no evidence that anything is happening except in one. This is just a curveball. 35:24 Erin: That's right. Yeah. 35:24 Wes: Because he's you know, or he says, that is no country for old men. 35:30 Erin: Right. 35:31 Wes: Why have I always read that as this is no country for. That's interesting. 35:34 Erin: Well, because he's away from it. He's traveling away from it. I'm imagining him in the ship moving in this direction, but facing this direction, looking. 35:43 Wes: I have sailed. Okay. 35:45 Erin: Yeah. 35:46 Wes: Okay. I was thinking he said I will sail and that there's no evidence that he actually did sail. But he says, I have sailed. Okay. 35:53 Erin: And come. So he's in Byzantium. 35:56 Wes: Yeah. Okay. 35:57 Erin: But everything else is. 35:59 Wes: So that's real. 36:00 Erin: Yes, is either an imperative or a future aspiration. Right, Right. 36:06 Wes: So, yeah. Then the next two stanzas, we have. We have a wish in three and then a intention. Right. A promise or a stated intent in four. 36:16 Erin: That's right. 36:17 Wes: Or three is not a wish, but it's a command. It's a command. 36:20 Erin: Yes. 36:21 Wes: That expresses a wish. So the two are. You know, you can see these two stanzas related or as one is kind of causally setting the groundwork for the other. Right. He's consumed by the fire, then he's out of nature. And then he comes back. He's like a phoenix rising from the ashes from the Grecian goldsmiths. 36:41 Erin: And it's dependent. If this. Then this. If I get consumed, then this will happen. 36:46 Wes: Yeah, It's a bit inconsistent because you think, okay, well, he's supposed to end up in the wall. Gather me into the artifice of eternity, which is at least initially what seems like the obvious conclusion there is ending up in the wall, not in a. Not in a bird. Not becoming back as a. As a golden bird. But yeah, we have these two stages. One is the. For the flesh and desire to be completely consumed away. And then there's the. And then there's the return. But I think it's hard not to read 4 as him retaining heart and desire. How could he keep singing without it? 37:24 Erin: Yes. Though I think. Yeah, I think V. The artifice of eternity is something that. Yet strange that the sages seem to have taken a form and therefore they're out of the artifice of eternity, but somehow they're in it. But yeah, it seems like he's returned to the world of potential and then can take shape anywhere. He could go into the wall, or he could go back to the country of the young, or he could do anything from this state, and instead what he chooses is the form of the bird, which in a way makes him, you know. Yeah, now I'm missing Leda and the swan. Right. Because that in a way, it makes him unto a God. And then he can actually incarnate in any form he wishes from that position of eternity. And he chooses a bird. 38:08 Wes: And he doesn't want to take the form of a natural thing. Right. An actual bird. But in a way, he is taking the form of a natural thing because it's the replica of a natural thing. 38:17 Erin: Right, right. 38:19 Wes: He could have just come back as a plate. 38:23 Erin: That's right. 38:26 Wes: And therefore I be eaten off of by the lords and ladies. 38:34 Erin: Yeah. 38:35 Wes: Set upon a table to place. Yeah. Anyway, he's found a good compromise here. 38:42 Erin: Right. To be a real bird is to get put back on the conveyor belt in one. It's just sex. 38:50 Wes: The sexual conveyor. 38:51 Erin: Yeah. That's just regular reincarnation. He wants some sort of eternal incarnation, I guess. 38:57 Wes: This is like a. This is a terminal reincarnation. 39:00 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 39:01 Wes: It's like getting an mfa. That's the end. 39:06 Erin: That's what they told me. You're four of repeats. 39:11 Wes: Some people go. Some people manage to go farther, but you could just stop. 39:17 Erin: Oh, this is painful. My Byzantium is Salt Lake City. 39:27 Wes: There you go. 39:31 Erin: My laptop is sitting on a Book of Mormon that somebody got me the first year I moved here. So that is my Gibraltar. 39:41 Wes: Someone, definitely. And I was working in room service. I've probably told this story before, but at a fancy hotel. And I ended up bringing someone complimentary champagne or wine for some reason. And I don't know. I don't remember why I did that, but I think because they're very, very friendly and nice and this and that. And then I realized that they just wanted me for my soul. It was a conversion attempt. 40:09 Erin: Oh, that's so insulting. 40:11 Wes: I just feel objectified. 40:14 Erin: I thought you wanted me for my body. 40:16 Wes: Beautiful soul. 40:20 Erin: That's the worst. 40:23 Wes: So I think I ended up with the Book of Mormon anyway. All right. I think next time we could do Leda and the Swan and then an Indian to his lover. If I'm remembering the title of that poem correctly, that was always a favorite of mine because it includes a line something like a parrot sways upon a tree, raging at its own image in the enameled sea, which is how I always felt. And we get to have another bird. Is that all right? 40:59 Erin: Sure. I love being given the bird. 41:02 Wes: Yeah. All right, thank you. 41:06 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. Go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always in the process of dying, art—the speaker seems to hope—is potentially eternal. And yet the poem’s final stanza also reminds us that art is ultimately for the living, and only as alive as its audience. Wes & Erin discuss Yeats’s meditation on whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity. Upcoming Episodes: Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and “The Indian to His Love,”; “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Yeats's poem Sailing to Byzantium begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer with a form of singing that is gilded by a human consciousness of a departure from nature, and where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are nevertheless always in the process of dying. Art, the speaker seems to hope, is potentially eternal. And yet the poem's final stanza also reminds us that art is ultimately for the living and only as alive as its audience. Today we discuss Yeats meditation on whether creativity can help us transcend mortality and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I guess I thought after Rosemary's Baby, doing a little more Yeats was somehow a natural transition. Maybe the Second Coming would have been more appropriate. But we already did that. 1:52 Erin: Is this our second or our third? Yeats? 1:55 Wes: No, I think it's our second. 1:57 Erin: Okay. 1:58 Wes: I think we did two recordings on Second Coming. 2:01 Erin: That's right. 2:02 Wes: Believe it or not, we took that one poem and we did four hours. 2:05 Erin: Oh, I believe it. 2:06 Wes: I believe it or no, that was back in the day when we were doing Postscript. So we did one hour and a little bit for each one of them. But. Yeah, but Sailing to Byzantium has long been a favorite of mine. And then we'll do Leda and the Swan as well for the next part. But. Yeah. What's your experience with sailing to Byzantium? 2:27 Erin: How many knots is that from here? I guess it's further from Salt Lake City, but anyway. No, I've never sailed to Byzantium, but I love this poem. Sorry. 2:38 Wes: Well, I know you've been to Byzantium because I was in Byzantium. 2:40 Erin: We have been. We have been to Byzantium together. Yeah, I remember. 2:44 Wes: That's right. 2:45 Erin: Specifically, the sages standing in the holy fire. That was a highlight. 2:52 Wes: Well, we were in the Hagia Sophia together. 2:54 Erin: Yeah, we were. We were. 2:56 Wes: So I think even though parts of the poem are taken to refer to Hagia Sophia. I think he was inspired by murals at Ravenna. 3:03 Erin: That's a city I've always wanted to go to. Yeah. 3:06 Wes: But, yeah, we are in the Hagia Sophia together. 3:10 Erin: Yeah. I have a picture of me standing in there, and I was like, oh, Wes took that picture because I was thinking about that the other day. Yeah. I usually. I go to places alone, and then I don't have any pictures of me. So when there's a picture of me that comes up, it's like, who was with. Oh, yeah, Wes was in there. Anyway. 3:26 Wes: Well, that's what I do when I'm feeling old. I head to Istanbul, hang out in mosques. 3:34 Erin: Istanbul, Constantinople. 3:36 Wes: What's your experience with the poem? Well, as opposed to the actual act of sailing? 3:41 Erin: Well, you know, it's one of my favorite Yeats poems. 3:44 Wes: It's. 3:44 Erin: It's a classic. I must have read it in high school. I remember being really impressed by the music of it, as always with Yeats. And. And there's always, you know, Yeats is such a treasure trove of everybody's movie titles or other. You know, he's such a. He's a. He's a great glossary for references. So, of course, that is no country for Old Men. I was immediately like, oh, that's. Yeah, probably when I was 14 or something. I was like, oh, that's. That's where Cormac McCarthy got it from, or something. Or maybe I didn't learn about Cormac McCarthy until later. I don't know. 4:16 Wes: Don't forget my favorite movie, Mackerel, Crowded Seas. 4:20 Erin: Oh, right. 4:22 Wes: Russell Crowe. 4:24 Erin: That does sound like a movie he'd be in. 4:28 Wes: It's all about Alaskan fishermen. 4:31 Erin: I thought that was made into. Yeah, that was the working title of Finding Nemo. 4:37 Wes: Right, right. 4:38 Erin: What about you? Did you read this in high school? 4:42 Wes: I think I must have. I don't remember. I went through a little bit of a phase in college, or. No. Just after I graduated from undergrad, where I was reading Yeats, living in Washington, D.C. with my mom in her efficiency apartment for a little while while I got on my feet, going to a day job at a Democratic political pollster, reading Yeats at night while eating Chinese food. 5:06 Erin: Sounds good. 5:08 Wes: Yeah. Which part? The efficiency with your mother? 5:11 Erin: Yeah, that part. 5:12 Wes: It's amazing. I think I probably revisited it after reading no country for Old Men, being reminded of it and then really loving it again. And what a great first line. 5:26 Erin: Yeah. I love the bait and switch. You think that is Byzantium, but no you're sailing to Byzantium from that. That is probably Ireland. 5:35 Wes: Right. I think in earlier drafts of this poem, it's clear that it actually. Yeah, it's definitely Ireland. So there's a lot of. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things to say about earlier drafts. I didn't look very closely at that. I just looked a little bit at Helen Vendler. Name of the book, Our Secret Profession. Is that the name? No. 5:54 Erin: I don't know. 5:54 Wes: Yeah, Yeah. I think it's a book called Ars. 5:58 Erin: Is that E. Yeats book? 5:59 Wes: Yeah. 5:59 Erin: Oh, nice. She's everywhere. She's all things. She's all wise and it's great. 6:04 Wes: It's truly. Yeah. What she has to say about this is great and very helpful. And then I looked a little bit at Harold Bloom and. Which is good one. 6:14 Erin: That is no country for old men. The young in one another's arms, Birds in the trees, those dying generations at their song the salmon falls, the mackerel, crowded seas, Fish, flesh or fowl commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born and dies caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unaging intellect. Should we go stanza by stanza? 6:43 Wes: Yes. 6:44 Erin: Okay. With apologies to everyone for my allergy laden voice. I don't have the gravitas I need to be like Ian McKellen reading this or something. But anyway. 6:56 Wes: Well, I think allergies bring you closer. 6:58 Erin: Yeah, exactly right. 7:00 Wes: To the gravelly old person voice. Goddamn young people. That's what this first stanza really is. He's tired of their rock and roll music. These. 7:13 Erin: Well, I also imagine the country as. This particular country as being the land of allergies. So I feel the need myself to sail away from wherever things are blooming. 7:29 Wes: This is no country for people with sensitive sinuses. 7:34 Erin: Never had allergies like this before. I'm just allergic to Utah at this point. 7:38 Wes: Well, after we're done with this, we can talk a little bit about Claritin. 7:42 Erin: Oh, I'm on. I'm on the heaviest and I'm on like a steroid. Nasal spray. 7:47 Wes: Oh, shit. 7:48 Erin: It is so bad. 7:49 Wes: It's flonase. 7:50 Erin: Yes, it's really bad. 7:52 Wes: Yeah, I take Claritin every day. Cause I have a cat and I can't have a cat. 7:57 Erin: You're allergic to your cat? 7:59 Wes: She's just a little. Because she's like the most hypoallergenic cat I've ever been around. But some cats I'm super allergic to. But her. 8:07 Erin: Wow. 8:08 Wes: You know, I could get by if I had to, even without Claritin. 8:10 Erin: Oh, that's love. 8:11 Wes: It helps. 8:11 Erin: You have a cat and you're allergic. 8:13 Wes: Yeah. That's sweet, because I need to, like, be able to wear her around my neck. 8:18 Erin: Yeah. 8:18 Wes: Just have unlimited contact. 8:20 Erin: Oh, I'm allergic to not having a cat. That's my problem. 8:24 Wes: There you go. There you go. But speaking of cats, flesh instead of fish, flesh and fowl. It's kind of reminiscent of Genesis, I thought. Right. You have fish and fowl, and then the creepy, crawly things on the earth are all the. So, yeah, but it's interesting that he refers to that as flesh. I guess that has something to do with the target of his attitude towards sensuality. Right. The young in one another's arms, the birds and the trees. The bees don't explicitly make a entrance, but I suppose the birds and the bees are really what's going on here. And then the little dig. Right. Well, you're dying too. I may be old, but you're right. Among the dying generations. 9:15 Erin: I think the contrast between oldness or maturation and this begotten born and dies is an interesting one. Right. Because it seems like later in the poem, this idea of sort of immortality or eternality is expanded upon. And when one is old, well, it seems like the speaker was born old or something. But it seems like something different from being in this cycle, this perpetual cycle that's spinning around and around where you're born and you die and you're born and you die. Being old is something else. Like that's a state that. That seems that the fish, flesh and fowl never achieve old age or something. That's right. 9:57 Wes: You would think there are other old people in this country. 9:59 Erin: Right, right. 10:03 Wes: He could have other old friends. 10:06 Erin: Exactly. They, like, shouldn't they play chess in the park together or something instead? No, 10:12 Wes: old people stuff. 10:13 Erin: Old people stuff. 10:15 Wes: But yeah, so it's a. That. That is a very interesting image when you think about it. A country of the eternally young, or the idea of a country as a metaphor for the. I don't know, the psychological terrain of youth, where once you get older, you kind of leave that terrain. So there is a country, right. For young people, it's the club. It's not just kidding. It's wherever young people congregate. Whatever young people's terrain is, psychologically or otherwise. That is. That is an eternally young country because you. You leave it just by getting older. 10:50 Erin: I see, I see. 10:51 Wes: Yeah. 10:52 Erin: I sort of had this idea that it was a place where you also died. Like the 27 Club, like where everybody just dies. Young. That kind of club. 11:00 Wes: But yeah, Logan's. Logan's Run. 11:03 Erin: Right. Exactly. Yeah. 11:05 Wes: Do you remember that corny movie? No. I mean, that. That movie, he was like, psychologically formative for me. It's, like, deeply ingrained. So. Yeah. But I did try to rewatch it recently, and I do find it a bit hard. When I was younger, it was magic. But having left that country, no longer. Yeah. So this reminds me a bit of Keats. Part of the urn poem. What is it? The frozen images of young people doing young people things. Do you pipe to the spirit? Ditties of no tone. Fair youth beneath the trees Thou canst not leave thy song Nor ever can those trees be bare. So, again, this kind of timeless quality. Because it's. Right. It's on the urn, isn't it? Is this an image on the urn? 11:58 Erin: Yes. 11:59 Wes: Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss Thou winning near the goal yet do not grieve, she cannot fade Though thou hast not thy bliss forever Wilt thou love and she be fair? One of the benefits of being on an urn, as opposed to actually being in real life, being a living being, actual flesh. But here, you know, there is this. There is this dynamism in this first stanza, which he will try to get away from. Right. As he heads towards. Well, he's already foreshadowed here monuments of an un aging intellect. The monument being the thing like the urn, which is the place of stasis and something eternally what it is. So this is the last hope, in a way, for someone who's older and for the artist who's gonna try to leave something eternal and un aging behind. Right. 12:58 Erin: If the urn is just the moment, you know, it's frozen in the moment just before consummation. This seems to be frozen at the moment of consummation. Right. Which is why there's that death inherent in the orgasmic, sensual place. The salmon falls and mackerel crowded seas too. I think of that kind of extreme competition and struggle, which is. Which seems to be inherent too, in the sort of mating ritual that's happening here. Like, there are more phases of the mating ritual going on here than are described in the relatively staid and sort of, you know, the urn is singular too. Like, it has multiple scenes. But in the one scene of courtship that's being described in that passage, it's just the one or it's just the two lovers, right? And he's straining to kiss her and isn't quite there. Whereas this is about the Teeming masses too. You know, this is about like the entire ecosystem that everyone is, in which everyone is struggling and in which there's competition. And that too I think has this kind of like, you know, the death inherent in the life giving moment. Kind of that sort of being pierced through with its opposite. 14:12 Wes: Yeah, it's the world of becoming, which. Right. As Aristotle would say, it's a combination of beingness and nothingness. Right. Because it's generation growth and then also decay. Everything's on its way to being more actualized or being out of existence. So being as we know it in the world of becoming, of the world of nature, which is. Right, very much what this is, the natural world, as opposed to the world of spirit, whether it's religious spirit or the world of art, of the aesthetic. Right. Is this world of becoming. So in a way, the first stanza is about leaving nature and it, it's, you know, you might see it as a metaphor for contemplating one's own death. I mean the world itself is not a place for old people at a certain point. So you just again you exit naturally. 15:07 Erin: Well, it's certainly not a place for self conscious people. And so that's the other thing. Yeah, yeah, that's. I think I mentioned that before, that line from Bull Durham that I love though this place has its own music, right. He calls it sensual music. It's not the kind of music he's after. And there's something neglectful about this kind of. The music produced in this kind of a place. It's too self interested, it's too harried, it's accidental, it's not studied. And so one, one needs to, to not neglect the monuments of unaging intellect if one is to be actually a self conscious person in the world. And so one has to abandon this country to attain that kind of self consciousness. I don't know if I'm, you know, I might be using that sort of incorrectly but in Bull Durham it's where the world is not made for those of us who were self conscious or. I can't, I can't remember exactly how the line goes, but yeah. Contrasting Kevin Costner's older, more experienced ballplayer with Tim Robbins, completely wild, appetitive pitcher who's all over the place. 16:20 Wes: Salmon falls. Right. The salmon are. This is evocative of the salmon swimming upstream to mate jumping. 16:27 Erin: I think so, yeah. 16:29 Wes: Going up, up the fall. 16:30 Erin: Yes. 16:31 Wes: Ironically, mackerel crowded seas. So, so very much evocative of gener. Or there are two types of generation. Right. There's reproduction. And then there's the generation of growth of a single being. But in this case, yeah, sexual reproduction being emphasized and commending, really, in Genesis, I guess, fish, flesh and fowl are in a way commended to Adam or to the care of human beings and to the naming of human beings. In this case, it's the previous generation that commends these new beings that they give birth to, to this country, to nature caught in that sensual music. All neglect. Too busy having fun to be into higher culture. 17:17 Erin: Well, yeah, it's funny. It's funny. That line, actually, you're making me see that. The possibility of reading that. So that they neglect their own sensual music, isolated as it is on that line. Right, yeah. So they're not even aware enough to know that they are creating a kind of music with. What would that be? Mating calls. Right. They're only seeing the utility or their own desire and therefore the utility of the mating call in order to procure, to keep producing these generations that are like on a conveyor belt, it seems. And they're ignorant of the fact that it is creating music. So maybe it takes. Even takes an older person to even hear that music or to recognize it as such in retrospect. Yeah, interesting. 18:06 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to share, or I don't know if I've shared it before, but just mention another one of my crazy theories, which is culture itself is a result of sexual selection. And I'm not the first to think of this, but there's a good. 18:22 Erin: I kept reading that on Twitter a few months ago or something like that 18:25 Wes: been written about it. Oh, yeah, that's. People are tweeting. 18:30 Erin: Trump even haven't been on Twitter in a few months. But yeah, last time I was on there, I was like, oh, this is. Some people are really malfunctioning. 18:42 Wes: Why does the peacock have its tail? Because that's the way the women peacock women want it. Or I guess peahens is what they'd be called. So it's sexual selection and that sense. And one can make an argument that that's human. Right. So that gender and the human mind and culture and everything that goes along with it are just sort of sexual selection on steroids in a way. They're selected for not just because they help us survive, but because they're attractive. And it goes two ways in human beings in a way that's not as obvious. Say in birds, where it's the peacock, the male that looks fancy, the female, not so much. But it's more about female Preference. But I bring all that up just because you mentioned utility. And. Yeah, so for, for animals, they're doing all of this proto artistic stuff, right? Singing for the mates. They even do, you know, if you watched some of these nature documentaries where you have the male birds doing these elaborate dances, right? Have you seen these in David Attenborough? And then sometimes they need like backup dancers and they have to rehearse and do all this stuff. 19:51 Erin: My favorite part of that is none of them ask what the women bring to the table. You know, It's a given. 20:01 Wes: What about their needs? Anyone ever think about that? 20:05 Erin: Their need is. Yeah, to get a woman. 20:09 Wes: And so there's, there's one species that practices this dance in front of a juvenile male that doesn't look yet look like a male, looks like a female because he's juvenile, doesn't have his colors yet. Anyway, then they do it for the female bird, him, the backup dancers hopping over each other, doing this elaborate ritual. And then she gives some, she looks for a second, kind of cocks her head, making a decision and she'll be like, she'll either fly off or she'll be like, all right, you can mate. Lasts like 3 milliseconds and then it's over. All that to commend what's going to come after it. So. So obviously animals can't become conscious of that. But even in human beings, right, there's sort of that imperative and it doesn't have to be sexual per se. It can be about winning reputation or rising in others esteem. That's part of the motive for artistic production. So it's more self conscious in that sense. But there's something right, to the extent that there's a worldly component to that and maybe even winning a mate, writing love poetry or something like that, it's not as pure as this idea of actually leaving something of yourself behind as a monument. I think they're similar, but. So maybe I'm making too fine a distinction here. I'm not sure, but. Right. Lodged firmly, firmly in the world of becoming and what's going to happen in the world of becoming but right after you're dead should. Doesn't matter, right to you personally if you're actually left behind in some sense. Shouldn't in a way. So the fantasy is taken to a different level at that point of transcending death itself, not just inducing reproduction. Right. Not just saying, okay, I can use my fine feathers, so to speak, to win a mate and then produce the next generation that's going to be left That'll be the monument. That'll be the thing that's left when I die. But no, doing something bigger than that. 22:18 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I think that the positive spin on that. Not that creating art is not interested in other people. Because I think part of what this poem is arguing is that that is a process through which one has to become interested in other people. But I would just say that, you know, to give a point to the young people's country. It is outwardly directed. And it is about, like, finding it's not something that's made too fine a point of in this particular poem. But just. Just to your point that, you know, there is, like, a way in which the potential solipsism of artistic production is actually escaped by this. You know, you could call it, like the utility factor of reproduction. But it's also. It's about trying to win over one other person. You know, it's about trying to please someone else. And therefore it has a kind of. I don't know, an inherent. Like, there's a selfishness to it. But there's also a selflessness which is, I think, present in artistic production as well. But it's more submer. Or it's more refracted. Right. Because you're maybe mostly communing with dead people in most cases. Or people that aren't there yet. So, I mean, there is something like. Of a linkage. There has to be. And I think this is what this poem is arguing like there has to be caring about something other than immediate appetitive needs. Which seems to be the young people's country's prerogative. But there is something that is about more than you, even in the young country. And it's about more than satisfying that I think, like, to reduce it all to appetite or like a kind of inherent selfishness. It doesn't sit right with me because there's too much sacrifice, actually. Right. That comes with that whole process that can't be ignored. I mean, you may be initially driven by desire, but you pay a heavy price for it. Eventually. Most people even know that when they're in the throes of desire. 24:06 Wes: I think, yeah, you pay a heavy price. You gotta be around people. People are pain in the ass. So we get tricked into being around each other. 24:20 Erin: Well, it results in children. And that, you know, especially for. For women, is quite. You know, that's quite the price to pay for Moment of fun. So. 24:31 Wes: Yes. 24:31 Erin: Yeah. 24:32 Wes: I'm just thinking of the. The female finch now trying to take that into her consideration when she's Evaluating the dance. 24:39 Erin: Well, that. But that's it, Right. It has to be worth. It has to be at least worth our while front. That's the whole point. Right. Because it's such a risk. 24:47 Wes: Shall we do the next stanza? 24:49 Erin: Yes. 2. An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick. Unless soul clap its hands and sing. And louder. Sing for every tatter in its mortal dress. Nor is there singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence. And therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium. 25:15 Wes: So, yeah, I like this image. An aged man has a tattered coat upon a stick. 25:20 Erin: Yeah. So cute and pathetic. 25:22 Wes: So the flesh is already disintegrating. So if you can't be in the world of flesh, hopefully you can make it into this more spiritual world. 25:32 Erin: Yeah. But there's still a. You know, the thing that confuses me most in this or that I have the most questions about in this stanza is for every tatter in its mortal dress. So the necessities to sing for the tatter, like to become when one becomes tattered, to then sing for the tatters is an interesting idea. It seems just as connected to the material in a way as the first stanza. So though there's no flesh, Right. Like, there's still a materiality which seems to govern the old man singing. 26:08 Wes: Right, Very good point. Right. So however sublime or aesthetically refined art might be, it will take the human as its object, and the human is tattered and flawed, even in the young. So art, of course. Yeah, is very much focused on our vulnerability and our mortality and on this world of becoming. It takes the world of becoming as its subject matter. And even religious art, right, has to take the spiritual as it is, as it comes, instantiated in human form. If it's pictures of Mary and Jesus, these are. Right. These are people. 26:49 Erin: We should, at some point do Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, in which, you know, this comes up as a theme in Browning's great poem in which the great Fra Lippo is. Is making angels and various figures too, instantiated somehow. You know, he's using local models, you know, exposing certain things and the town. But, you know, there's this argument that, you know, like, he should be portraying angels in a less fleshy way, that there should be something more ethereal. And, of course, this is at the point at which, in the burgeoning Renaissance, when perspective is coming back in and figures have more of this sense of roundness and of reality, Browning imagines that Fra Lippo is causing a lot of trouble by making people look less like they did in medieval iconography and more like real people. 27:51 Wes: Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah. Just to the point of monuments of an unaging intellect. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. Because often the artistic monument is a monument of something. Subject matter that itself is not un aging. It's human. 28:06 Erin: Right. 28:07 Wes: And essentially tattered. So. Yeah. So you get this right. Explicit idea here that he's gonna sing for every tatter and somehow redeem mortality and human flaws. Nor is there singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence. So this in a way seems to turn away from the previous idea. So you sing for the tatters, but singing school, I mean, what is this? We study previous great examples of poetry. 28:39 Erin: Yeah. I think the monuments of an unaging intellect, it seems to be the ability to freeze in time. Like to have that first stanza at all. Right. To somehow recapitulate in art the sensual music which without the person recording it would simply fade away or would just continue without any self consciousness about its own existence. And so that un agingness seems to be like. To freeze that moment in time and therefore to like intellectualize it or to make it into something to something in a poem. Those then become ranked, I suppose. Right. So you have the better and the worse efforts. And one has to then study the monuments of magnificence which represent the best examples of the frozen sensual music. Right. I'm just trying to think through this out loud. Or the frozen tatters, if it's Lear or something. 29:45 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. I'm looking back again at monuments of un aging intellect. And now it occurs to me that that is ambiguous. Right. Monuments produced by unaging intellect. Monuments to an aging intellect. So that. Right. There's something in. In the art object that is un aging because it's an expression of some part of us that's un aging and honors that. Right. Is a man is also a monument to that. So it. It expresses it. But then it also is a monument of its own magnificence. In this case, I think that sing. Right. Singing. Singing is a monument of its own magnificent. It points back to singing. So singing versus intellect. Why have we made that transition? Maybe that's my question. Why have we gone from intellect to singing? The first thing that would naturally occur to me at the end of the first stanza is actual monuments like physical monuments. And then maybe after that, because of intellect, philosophy. 30:51 Erin: Right. 30:52 Wes: But when we get to the second stanza, now we. Now it sounds more like poetry. 30:56 Erin: Right. But this is where I think that any. Any actual intellect that he's describing in the first stanza is just this idea of this frozen sensual music or this sensual music transcribed. That's all it is. I'm gonna get this wrong, but Yeats has this poem. It's called A Prayer for Old Age. And the first four lines, God guard me from those thoughts. Men think in the mind alone. He that sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone. Yeah, so. So this is a really important idea in Yeats, that I don't think that there is this division necessarily between intellectual life and the sensual in that they come from different realms. I think it's simply the recording of the sensual music that distinguishes the young from the old. 31:47 Wes: Or. 31:48 Erin: Or this idea of self awareness, self consciousness, whatever you want to call it. 31:51 Wes: Right. 31:51 Erin: Because there's no. In fact, I think this. This speaks to a really profound and deep truth, which is that the only thing that makes. Makes something intellectual as such is simply the. The noticing of the sensual. Like the noticing of those qualities of life which maybe other people don't notice. The examination, Right. The dwelling upon those things which we actually all experience, but which few do notice. Remark upon, record. Write down in some way, right? So there's like an inherent connection. So he's not saying that there's some sort of higher life which the young people are divorced from. Rather, they're participating in something which the older or the artistic person is merely noticing more intensely. Right. And so that. That, like. I'm calling it transcription, because it's like the idea of writing down the song. So you preserve something about. Like the fact that it is a song is essential. And you have to preserve the song in the handing down of the intellectual information. Because something about the song, something about the beauty is essential to that information, to understanding the country of the young. Otherwise it's not accurate and it's not a great. It's not a monument of magnificence. So the magnificence has to have the beauty preserved. 33:19 Wes: And you're thinking here of the. So the primary beauty is the beauty of. Is natural beauty or. 33:25 Erin: Yes, yeah. 33:26 Wes: The beauty of the song that's used. 33:30 Erin: The sensual music. 33:32 Wes: Yeah, the sensual music of life. 33:34 Erin: Of life. 33:35 Wes: Right. So whatever's naturally beautiful about that, and then you're doing things with it poetically, just to keep with poetry, since I think that's largely what this is about. You do things formally. Right. To create beauty by the very nature of the structure of the poem and the way language works. So there's beauty that is not Related to the beautiful content, but somehow. Right, so it's not. It's new, but it's somehow meant to convey that original beauty which is its object. Am I getting that right? 34:11 Erin: Yes. 34:12 Wes: Right. So if you do a landscape painting, for instance, the beauty of the painting is not just the beauty of the thing that you took the picture of or made the picture of, it's the beauty of the painting. But it has to capture something about that original natural beauty. It transforms it. Obviously, you know, as an aesthetic object, the two are related. So. Yeah, this is interesting. This isn't something. I don't know if this is getting at your point. It is, but it's something I haven't thought about. 34:41 Erin: Yeah. I think part of it is the choice in what one records, Right. Like, there's the mere fact that one chooses this landscape versus that landscape and what one cuts out of the frame, et cetera. That's the thing that we've chosen to preserve the extent to which it's preserved poorly or not, or it's shown to sort of best advantage. But I think it's easier to make this connection in poetry because one could say that, you know, to use the most obvious example, the iambic pentameter is the pulse, right? So that the music in poetry as transcribed from the sensual music, the meter, somehow it gives the life to the preserved piece of sensual music on the page. So that there's some sort of pluck something out of life which we deem worth recording, we record it on the page. And then with, you know, if we're lucky, and we produce something of great magnificence, it somehow is then imbued with this kind of divine, kind of artistic divinity in which, like, life is blown back into it through the beauty of that song. Right. But that it has, like a music in it seems to me to be related to this idea of the mating call, or even just like the heartbeat has something alive in it. 35:59 Wes: Yeah, very good. And that's why he went to Byzantium, and that's why. 36:03 Erin: So the destination is Byzantium. What that means is one thing, but also the idea of the Odyssey to get there is another. I mean, you know, the Odyssey doesn't exist, right. It's like. It's just, I have sailed the seas and come, Right? But there's some journey, some attainment that has to happen that sort of elided here. And Byzantium is the object. So why Byzantium, I suppose, is just like the most essential, Right. So it seems like this exoticized location, I suppose, first of all, I mean it's the holy city of Byzantium, so it's this meeting point between east and West. It's like the, the navel of the Western world or something like that. Or of the world. I mean. 36:45 Wes: Yeah, I mean I had this question, of course, what is the significance of Byzantium for Yeats in particular? And I think it has something to do with the monumental nature of the city. Yeah, you were talking about the Odyssey and how that can't happen yet. It can't happen until Leda gets with the swan. I know, and Helen is born and Troy is over overrun and all that. And I guess Byzantium would be not too far from Troy. I mean Troy comes to be associated through the Aeneid, Right. With the rise of the Roman Empire as well. And then as at a certain point, as the western half is failing, the Byzantium becomes the place. But my primary association is of Byzantium with this particular type of religious art. And think of the murals that he's talking about, which seem to be, have a gold background and they're specifically Christian in nature, but they're, I mean, I guess you could say this about Christianity in general, but it's overlaid on its, you know, kind of pagan precursor. 37:56 Erin: Yeah, I mean, because of that overlay, it's the. So it seems like it's the nexus of all wisdom somehow or of all threads kind of merge there, come together there. 38:06 Wes: He had some, you know, I guess the thing we're leaving out is he had all these mystical ideas that he had that I didn't want to get into remind myself it has some significance in his system. We could just say that and these thousand year cycles or whatever or 2000 year cycles and things like that. And one of them is a specifically Hellenic, I guess era and the next is Christian and then there's the second. 38:31 Erin: Yeah, but there's also just this idea of the, you know, I mean like one could say that Rome is the same way. Right. There's the idea of the Judeo Christian and the Greco Roman and that those two things, you know, overlaid on top of each other in a particular place make it all the richer as a symbol for these types of intelligences coming together. And like in Ravenna or in, in Venice, another similar city in which these cities are places of trade and therefore where all of these various traditions came together and are reflected in the architecture. So they have, as in Venice, there's Moorish influence. Same thing in Ravenna. Right. There's a tremendous amount of east and west collision happening. 39:20 Wes: Byzantium is the city where Christianity truly becomes ascendant over ancient Rome. That's where Constantine makes it. So it certainly is that nexus point for transition from the Greco Roman to the Christian. 39:36 Erin: Right. And if you've got a date in Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul. 39:44 Wes: So I think we're. I think we're gonna spend the whole recording. 39:48 Erin: Oh, no. Okay. 39:51 Wes: I was thinking later would be be Leda and the Swan would be a kind of a backup, but maybe we could do another Yeats recording next time with Leda and then something else. 39:59 Erin: Yeah, that would be good, because I have more to say about Leda than I do about Sailing to Byzantium. Yeah, like way more, for some reason. 40:08 Wes: Well, that swan is very sexy. 40:10 Erin: Yeah. Yikes. 40:12 Wes: Irresistible. Some say. 40:14 Erin: Well, the music of sailing to Byzantium is so insane, intense that it takes, you know, like, in a way, it's such a. We're making more of it than I thought we would. Because in a way, it's a. It's so clear. Like the. The diction is so clear and yet, of course, scratch the surface for a second and everything comes out. But anyway. 40:34 Wes: Right. Yeah. Well, so that concludes part one of our recording on sailing to Byzantium. We got through exactly half, so good job. We'll do the second half in part two, stanzas three and four. Thank you. 40:51 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal. Upcoming Episodes: Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “An Indian to His Love.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Rosemary. I was just asking Erin whether if she remembers on first watching, it was clear to her that this was not in Rosemary's head, that this was all real all along. 0:46 Erin: Yeah, I remember going back and forth because a book like all of Them Witches. Okay, that's a ridiculous title. It all comes down to an anagram. It's the kind of thing that you start. You start taking orders from your dog, you know, it's indicative of a kind of mental breakdown. And then there are scenes like when, like at the party, the under 60 party, just Rosemary looks so awful. I find those scenes to be extremely like, actually, those are the most upsetting scenes in the film for me to see how bad she looks. And the friends are like, this is crazy. You know, you've been having this pain since November, you know, that is really powerful. And of course, you know, we haven't even gotten to sort of the. Whether or not the whole film is just a parable of what happens to women in pregnancy and the ways in which women are just told to accept certain things by people who supposedly know better or their feelings are dismissed, their symptoms are dismissed. Yeah. So that's a powerful moment for me. Women tell her, like, this is not normal, you know, after she's been told not to talk to other women. It's so insidious. It's so. Yeah, I went back and forth first time I saw it. I remember not. Not really knowing. It's very, very clear the second time around that she's crazy. 2:05 Wes: She even says, this is not a dream. This is really happening. 2:08 Erin: I was just gonna say, yeah, that just makes sense. Silliest moment. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. 2:15 Wes: Then you think, well, wait a minute, if she's saying that, then it can't be real. 2:19 Erin: Right. 2:20 Wes: So very expertly done then. Yeah, I think, keeping us in doubt and. Cause really the ending, I think, is kind of punchline to a setup for a joke. The whole movie is one big setup to a really funny and well delivered punchline, which is what that scene is in the end when she wanders into the. 2:40 Erin: You're going like this with the knife. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're doing that. 2:46 Wes: Right, right, yeah. 2:48 Erin: Rosemary handhold. 2:49 Wes: Yeah, she's got the knife. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of tip offs to. To the fact that this is real. But of course, to anyone else, and perhaps to us, you know, in a first viewing of the film, she seems like there's a good chance she's just someone having a paranoid episode, but she's really Being gaslighted, man, I knew you 3:07 Erin: were going to say this word and I was going to, I was going to tease you and be like, what other word works here? 3:17 Wes: So that really is gaslighting, right? 3:20 Erin: It really is. 3:22 Wes: Yeah. But disagreeing with someone's not gaslighting me. Stop gaslighting me. You're making me feel crazy for being disagreed with. Anyway, that's all very passe now. Culture war stuff. Who cares about that when the world is ending? 3:42 Erin: But you mentioned too, at the end of the last part about. About the fact that they were going to go with a different type from Mia Farrow. And I think we should talk about that and about the significance. I'm still trying to work it out. The significance of the haircut besides the fact that it's in the book. I looked at it as in the book that she gets that cut and she had it in real life. The idea that they initially wanted to go with someone more full figured. And also the fact that that Burton Taylor joke happens at the beginning of the film. You know, there's this image of motherhood and fecundity that's associated with a type like Elizabeth Taylor or like one of the women that they wanted to cast in this part. And instead they go with Mia Farrow, who then. Who looks, you know, awful for a good portion of the film. And I don't know if that haircut is just about making her look more skeletal and sicker or what. I don't know if you have a read on that. 4:34 Wes: This is not long after they learn that they're gonna have the baby. How does she tell him? 4:40 Erin: She hands him something. I didn't get that. 4:42 Wes: She gives him a quarter because they bet a quarter earlier. Oh, what did they bet a quarter on, though? So giving him a quarter signifies that she lost that bet. And then maybe the bet was about getting pregnant. 4:56 Erin: Okay, I couldn't even tell that it was a quarter. It looked strange to me. I don't know. 5:01 Wes: Okay. Anyway, and then right after getting that news, she complains about him not being opened and he admits he's self centered, but then he does a very self centered thing and leaves off kissing her and celebrating with her because he's got to go tell the Castevets. So I got to tell my friends about this. And then brings him down to celebrate. And then it's after that point she spontaneously puts on the amulet and gets her first drink from Minnie, gets that drink prescription. And it's then that after that that she comes home to him practicing lines and she has that. She has short hair. And how does he. How does he say, you know, he says, don't tell me. Don't tell me. You paid for that. And then she goes right into having pain. I think Hutch. Right. Hutch reacts to her hair as well. 5:50 Erin: Does he or does he? It seems to me that other than Guy, everyone is reacting to how bad she looks in terms of her coloring and the lost weight. 6:00 Wes: Right. So, yeah, I'm getting this mixed up. Hutch says, my God, when he sees her, and she says, it's Vidal Sassoon. He's not talking about the hair. He's talking about how she looks. 6:11 Erin: But the hair increases before that. 6:13 Wes: Before that, someone says that it's the haircut that looks awful. 6:17 Erin: That's Guy. Guy says that. 6:19 Wes: Okay. 6:19 Erin: He says, you look fine except for the hair. Because he's trying. Happening to her as normal. 6:23 Wes: Yeah. It sets up this interesting binary between. Does she look bad because of the hair? Does she look bad because she's sick? You know, I guess we have. We might also take that haircut as a way of. As kind of a weak attempt at asserting independence from the patriarchy, from Guy. She's doing. 6:45 Erin: She's doing a modern Guy's Everywhere thing, 6:48 Wes: the 60s version of a modern woman. 6:49 Erin: She actually looks. I mean, if anybody could pull off this haircut, obviously, it's. It's Mia Farrow and Twiggy. But it seems to me to be a rejection of femininity at a time when she should be feeling. I mean, she doesn't have to feel anyway. Far be it from me to tell her how to feel. That's what everybody else is doing, but. Right, but in which one typically feels at their most feminine or could feel that way. Obviously, the vast spectrum of experiences of pregnancy complicates this because some women are just sick their entire pregnancy, you know, and they never feel great and they don't get the glow that's promised to them. But at least in the cultural consciousness. Right. It's associated with this increased. This idea of increased femininity and of sort of like being at the apex of one's female potential. 7:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Because to reject that. That's one form of rejecting character. In a way, to have less hair is to have less character. It's to transcend that pigeonholing into one role or form of character or another. 7:50 Erin: Oh, I see. Oh, I see. 7:51 Wes: And if you have no hair, you can just put on a wig and be an actor. So it pushes her in that direction. That's interesting, because he is Practicing lines when she comes home to him. But, yeah, she opens up her identity a little bit. It's more fluid at that point. It's more capable of taking on new forms. 8:12 Erin: Yeah, that's great. And so in that way, it's better than. Because, again, I went back to the Burton Taylor thing, and if they wanted a more full figured woman, a woman who's more indicative of this kind of fertility, this. You know, I mean, I think of Liz Taylor as being like this, like, pagan goddess of femininity. 8:30 Wes: If it were Liz Taylor, she'd be leading the cult by the second act. 8:34 Erin: Oh, yeah. Of course. They'd be worshiping her. 8:39 Wes: Yeah. 8:40 Erin: But, yeah, so I like this idea that. Yeah, that. That's actually too limiting. That makes sense. It's satisfying to me. 8:47 Wes: You know, if she is trying to escape, you could see that as this kind of Satanist impulse. So it's no accident that she's had her first drink, maybe, and she's started to get sick. It's the right. The pain that starts right after the drink, right after the haircut. 9:06 Erin: Is there anything we can make of the tannis root and of the fungal here besides the fact that her husband is a really fun guy? No. You thought there was a bigger payoff, you said. 9:19 Wes: Yeah, when I saw. Watching this for the second time, I expected a bigger payoff for the tannis thing. I just thought based on a fuzzy memory of the first viewing. But, yeah, not much is said. Right. Except that it's kind of a fungal. A fungal witch thing. 9:36 Erin: Thinking through it now. Okay, so the woman who was in the apartment before them, whose name is Mrs. Gardenia. I guess you can only be named after plants if you live in that 9:44 Wes: apartment and have so many herbs that you're. 9:48 Erin: Yes, yes, I thought quite a bit about that after, because I thought there's so many great things that happen just in that first scene, as you already pointed out, we learn that she fell into a coma. 9:58 Wes: Right. 9:58 Erin: Rosemary, we learn, is a bit superstitious. And I see this as being, again, the sort of vestiges of Catholicism, you know? Did she die in the apartment? Not that it matters. You know, I'm not superstitious, I swear. You know, and we learn that she was in a coma for several months before passing away, which is exactly what happens to Hutch. And that moving the secretary in front of the closet, like, was there a falling out? Was she actually part of the cult or was she discarded? But the idea of the place, of the building itself being a character and of this is something I'm very, very interested in this idea of landscape or of space. Could be this building. It could be whatever. Whatever has transpired in the long history of a place leaves its scars on that place. And I think that this is maybe related to this idea of the fungal infection that the whole house seems to have. So they're all. They're all part of the coven. And the apartment itself will get. It's connected ultimately. Right. It's connected to the apartment from which it was initially broken off from when they made the apartments smaller. I can't imagine what that apartment looked like. The idea of the fungus that's kind of like growing underneath the floorboards or the thing that's behind the wall. Right. The silent killer, you know, mold, fungus, whatever you want to call it. Right. That seems to be as much a part of the building itself, of which the coven are almost like this outgrowth or this flowering of what's inside the walls. Right. As it is there, because the people are there. So it's a sort of chicken and egg scenario. You know, there's a reading of the film in which the building just bad or something. Right. It's, you know, the basement being a scary place. I don't know. And much is made of basements, actually. There's even a basement in the ship that she goes on in her dream where she gets impregnated. Right. She goes below deck. So something about structure and the structure of the unconscious and all that, which is being paralleled here. 12:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, what is the theory here about how this is supposed to work? 12:10 Erin: That it drugs her and makes her, therefore, more willing to be manipulated? 12:14 Wes: Is that. 12:15 Erin: Is that all. 12:15 Wes: That's the idea. 12:16 Erin: Yeah. That she's just kind of out of it all the time? 12:19 Wes: I guess so. I mean, I. You know, how do you. Yeah. How do you get pregnant with Satan? I guess Satan himself is the one who has sex with her, Right? 12:28 Erin: Well, no, it's. Is it John Cassavetes in Satan makeup? Those eyes. 12:33 Wes: Yeah. It seems to be some sort of hybrid of. It looks like it's him. And then you see. So, yeah, you get the idea that he's been somehow possessed by Satan. 12:43 Erin: Yeah. 12:44 Wes: And then is having sex with her as Satan with the nasty hands. Pause. Scratch. Scratching her. And then I think I always vaguely thought, well, I guess the drink and the tannis root and all that stuff. Is there tannis root in the drink as well? 12:59 Erin: I assume there is. 13:00 Wes: Right. 13:00 Erin: And then Minnie confirms it. 13:02 Wes: It's very important she get that drink. And I. And it's making her sick. But it seems like there's something more to it. Like, okay, well, yeah, if you're gonna have Satan's kid, you gotta have some tanis root. You gotta. It's the, it's the Satanist version of vitamin pills. But even more important. 13:20 Erin: Mm. Well, what you're making me realize is, okay, so if Satan himself, he needs a physical conduit to come into the world. So instead of somehow incarnating, he has, he himself needs a host. So Guy is pregnant with the devil before Rosemary is. There's also, of course, a parody of everything is just parodic attached to the fungus on Catholicism, if you will. You know, so instead of the angel appearing to Mary and asking her, you know, and her giving her assent so that its consent is received, you know, of course, like the Antichrist would have to be conceived through a rape. The pregnancy would have to be, you know, Mary, because she's the immaculate conception, has no pain in delivery and presumably, of course in pregnancy, because these are the wages of original sin. Pain is wage of original sin. And so because Mary is the immaculate conception, she has a pain free pregnancy and delivery. Or at least that's the logic. And rather than the Holy Spirit being the thing that impregnates her, it's what, it's an actor that's the opposite of the Holy Spirit. 14:34 Wes: Happens to be her husband as well. 14:36 Erin: Happens to be her husband. Right, right. Yeah, but the Holy Spirit is part of the Trinity. So there's this three in one thing. There's this. I don't know, I'm not gonna be able to get there. I'm trying to think through it, but his part of the equation, I mean, what I wanted to say early on, and I'll come back to this, it's just that, you know, what's so interesting and sneaky about this movie is that Guy is really the main character. You know, I mean, it's all his doing. I mean, if this were a different film, it would just be a Faust story and he would be Faust. He would be the title character. So he's the one that's making all of this happen. It's with his assent that she gets pregnant. Yeah. And his sort of demonic possession preempts Rosemary's own demonic pregnancy. 15:23 Wes: There's a whole other version of this where you could lift everything that's in background into the foreground and then put what's in foreground into the background and it would be just as compelling. It would be the Faust story if, you know, we would learn of how it is that Minnie and Roman seduced him or whatever, how they got him to make this bargain. We would learn more about what's going on for him psychologically, such that he's so vulnerable to this. So we would see him get corrupted and then I guess, presumably we would see him suffer for his choice. Right. 16:00 Erin: Well, instead there's literally a blank space. Remember when she's in the kitchen washing dishes with Minnie and they look into the room and you just see the smoke because they're out of frame. So you just see the empty room with smoke coming from there, cigarettes. So of course that's, you know, that's the Faustian moment. Right. But they're not in the frame. It's like the shot of the. They're around the corner. So you just see the empty room of smoke. 16:25 Wes: I see. I didn't. Yeah, I didn't think of that. That's very cool. 16:30 Erin: Yeah. But I mean, you know, so the film is obviously, I mean, by making her the subject, I mean, this is its brilliance and this is also, you know, I wouldn't wish the film to be about Guy because that would be quite boring. And part of the reason why she is the subject is because of the feminist themes in the film. Yeah. So then it becomes a parable about this unsuspecting woman who. Around whom all these men exert control. Not exclusively men, but. Right. Older people, people in positions of authority and men exert control over her. 17:01 Wes: She is very passive and it does seem guilt ridden. Right. It does seem connected to her Catholicism. She's guilty and self effacing and self doubting and so can be pushed around in this way. 17:15 Erin: Well, I mean, the worst instance of this is her getting scratched up and it's just dropped that he raped her. She just can't even. I mean that, that is just unbelievable to me. I don't know. It's believable. 17:32 Wes: But yeah, yeah, no, I had the same. I had the same reaction. I think it played differently back then, but. 17:37 Erin: Oof. God. And then I. I don't think so. 17:41 Wes: I think notes I started to put by contemporary standards. Rape. I started. 17:47 Erin: No, no, no. 17:48 Wes: And then I thought. And then I stopped myself because I felt. I felt too guilty about even writing. Writing that. But no, I do think it. I. I think the scratches. It plays more. And it plays more ambiguously. But yeah, assume it's disturbing in 68 as well. But I think it's more potent today. 18:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It's set in 65 and then they have New Year's and it's 66, which I was like, okay, it's six, six, and then an upside down six with the nine. So they had to do it that way. And then he says, oh, the year one, Roman announces at the party. And I was like, that's right. 18:31 Wes: But, yeah, so it's believable that. Right, it's believable that she could be raped while she's passed out and then not give more than kind of a tepid objection to it. She objects. 18:42 Erin: And she's disturbed. 18:44 Wes: And she's disturbed. But it's. It's. Yeah, she doesn't feel like she has the right to. 18:50 Erin: Yeah, that's. I think one of the things that's so disturbing about this is that he is, like, treating her like a broodmare, you know, and he is the one who's aware of what's going on in her body more so than she is at all times in the film. 19:03 Wes: Right. 19:04 Erin: He knows more about what's happening inside her than she does. 19:07 Wes: So he could always say, but, honey, it was the devil who raped you. Sorry, it wasn't me. It was the devil. 19:14 Erin: Right, Exactly. Exactly. That's the get out of jail free card. 19:20 Wes: The devil made me do it. No, the devil did in through me. 19:24 Erin: All of them devils, they made me do it. 19:27 Wes: So I think in that sense, yeah, she's a good target for the cult. She's vulnerable. But Guy is also a good target. Right. It's trickier to take down a couple than to take down, like, someone like Terry. 19:39 Erin: Yes. 19:40 Wes: Someone who's a dope fiend or an ex dope fiend. He has to be picked up off the sidewalk and then groomed. And that seems like a simpler project in a way than trying to get a couple. 19:53 Erin: And yet she puts up a fight, but she actually has a little bit more agency than Rosemary. 20:02 Wes: True. 20:03 Erin: Yeah. 20:03 Wes: But, you know. Yeah. Guy's vulnerability, of course, is his ambition. And so, you know, you get the Faustian theme as a way to. As a kind of entry point for Minnie and Roman are a vulnerability that they can take advantage of. 20:17 Erin: This is right after she's eaten the mousse, which I did notice that they have different. The tops of their two cups of mousse are different, I guess to clue Guy into which one he should give to her. He yells at her for not wanting to eat it because she doesn't like the undertaste. And he says, there's always something wrong, you know, and then. Anyway, then they're watching the Pope on tv, or he is, and he says, it's the Pope at Yankee Stadium. And then he mentions, that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial. So it's like. It's this wonderful moment where, you know, religion is just in service of his career, you know, which is that. That's just the encapsulation of his whole. His whole character is just putting any religious impulse he might have just simply in terms of what he can get out of it, in terms of fame and notoriety or whatever. 21:11 Wes: Right. She doesn't eat most of the mousse. Right. 21:14 Erin: Which is maybe why she waits. 21:16 Wes: Napkin. Oh, right. She's not fully. Yeah. When did undertaste become aftertaste? 21:22 Erin: I don't know. I know. She says it so many times. 21:24 Wes: Undertaste is not a thing anymore. 21:26 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It's related to the house, the basement, the fungus, the. Yeah, it's underneath. It's not after. It's under. 21:36 Wes: Right. 21:36 Erin: And it's chalky. And then she's. Someone says she looks like a piece of chalk, so. 21:40 Wes: Right. 21:41 Erin: She's all fungal. 21:42 Wes: Gross. 21:44 Erin: Yeah. So what about Hutch? We have. 21:47 Wes: I was saying the same sentence in my mind. Sorry. 21:50 Erin: There you go. We have a man of this older generation, and he writes boys adventure stories. Is that right? 22:00 Wes: Oh, is that what he does? Okay. 22:01 Erin: Oh, where did I get that? 22:03 Wes: It's when Guy is casting aspersions on him, he uses that. Right. 22:08 Erin: Yeah. Oh, those boys adventure stories are going to his head. That's what he says. 22:14 Wes: Is he reading the stories or is he writing the stories? Yeah. In any case. Yeah. He's. Well, so he's a mentor figure. He stands in stark contrast. Right. So ideally, that's what the older generation is. It's. It stands in a role of mentorship to the young people. And so Minnie and Roman are more sinister variations on that. I guess it must be Rosemary who has the primary relationship with Hutch. And I guess we don't know what the history of that is. 22:47 Erin: Is he their current landlord? So maybe he doesn't need an occupation. Maybe he's just a landlord who sits around reading these adventure stories. Or maybe he doesn't at all. And Guy is just being mean. 22:58 Wes: Well, where do we first meet him? He's getting dinner. I guess it's after they decide to take the apartment. It's about, like, seven minutes into the movie. They decide to take the apartment, and then suddenly they're with Hutch. 23:10 Erin: Yes. 23:10 Wes: I think that's their first introduction to him. And he's taking chicken out of the oven. 23:14 Erin: Lamb. It's lamb. 23:16 Wes: Lamb. Oh, well, there you go. 23:17 Erin: Yeah, that's how I know. 23:23 Wes: And what does he say? I think. Does he say, I was tempted to write the management? That you were drug addicts and litter bugs. Instead, I tried to lie and tell them you are wonderful tenants. Okay, so he's the landlord. Why are they leaving this landlord and mentor figure that they get along so well with? I suppose it's. They're planning on having children and they need more space. 23:45 Erin: Just before this, when they're still in the apartment, he says, I could walk to all the theaters from here. That's kind of ironic, because then he gets a part where he's on crutches anyway. He can limp to all the theaters. I'm just kidding. So maybe they want to have a baby. They want to be in a bigger place. They think it's time to upgrade. You took guy's lack of success or discontent as being a monetary thing. I didn't. The guy who's showing them the Bramford says, oh, that's where the money is. And he says, yeah, and the artistic thrills, too, or something like that. Yeah. 24:18 Wes: No, I was thinking of him as. 24:21 Erin: You weren't sure. Okay. 24:22 Wes: Yeah. Having ambition. Someone who has artistic ambitions, but in a way has sold out with the commercials. 24:30 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 24:31 Wes: Has not gotten rich by selling out. 24:34 Erin: Okay, he's not rich. But they're comfortable, I thought, and able 24:38 Wes: to upgrade enough to get a tiny, tiny apartment in the Dakota building. 24:46 Erin: It's just the back six or whatever the hell. 24:49 Wes: It's one tenth of what the original 24:50 Erin: apartment was back four. They live upstairs from Lauren Bacall and downstairs from John Lennon. Anyway. Yeah. And does he not want to move? He's not sold on it. She seems to be. You know, she's kind of nesting. When they move in, they really transform it. I mean, they paint it white. They. You know, there's a nursery that they assemble when she gets pregnant. So, you know. But she's kind of already doing that before she gets pregnant. So it seems to me that it's. This is the. We're gonna start a family apartment. The other one was the starter apartment, and there has to be enough money to do that. But he doesn't want to move. I thought he's the one who's actually wary about moving, which seems to me to be about how he wants to just, yeah. Do his thing and not have a baby and all that. And I think that maybe what I wanted to say about his potential jealousy of her in part one was related to this idea that, you know, he's an actor, but she Seems to be the likable one. Like, she's the one who has the relationships. She's the one who has the friends. She's the one who's friends with Hutch. He isn't. There's something about him that maybe is related to this idea that he's not a good actor. It's just that he's. I mean, he seems charming enough at the beginning, but, like, he's kind. He has that under. Undertaste of being a bit of a jerk and an arrogant guy who people just don't take to. And that seems to me to be connected to his bad acting. 26:12 Wes: Yeah. Who's at the party? I mean, they have a party with a bunch of people. Is it all her people? 26:17 Erin: It seems like it. 26:18 Wes: It's her party. Yeah. 26:20 Erin: Yeah. She's the one who has the guest list all set up, and he wants to invite the older couple, so he's not so interested in their friends. He's not attached to that like he can. In accepting this Faustian bargain, it seems he has very little to lose socially. Like, he could just discard people and get with this older couple, whereas she's the one who seems to have the ties, you know, so they come as a unit, but they're really friends with the wife because he's insufferable, you know, that seems. Seems part of this. 26:51 Wes: Yeah. So I think you're right. He's reluctant to move. She's enthusiastic about the apartment. He's worrying about the rent and stuff like that. She has to plea with him. Please, can we take it? You know, Guy, let's take it. Please. And he's pretty. You know, it's not like he's hard to convince or something like that, but you get some sense that it's really her desire that's driving them forward at this point. And, yeah, I think you're right. He. He would be more static if it weren't for her. So I guess. Yeah. So. So he. He's gonna find some. Some real mentorship. When he. When he moves into this new building, he falls in love with these. These old people who initially, I think he thinks they're kind of. They're gonna be a drag, right? 27:35 Erin: Oh, yes. 27:36 Wes: She's the one who agrees to have dinner with them, and he's not happy about that, though. 27:41 Erin: Then it immediately switches, and she's quite wary of them for a long time. You know, she doesn't like the fact that they're actually too nice. She sees that there's something insidious about their Generosity. 27:50 Wes: And then Guy. It's almost like an affair. I mean, Guy becomes more preoccupied with them. 27:56 Erin: Yeah. I find it very, very odd that he runs over to tell them without her when. When she's pregnant. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he runs over and doesn't. Like, he doesn't call them over. And, you know, of course, it makes sense in hindsight that he has to go tell them, hey, our plan worked, you know. 28:12 Wes: Yeah. 28:13 Erin: Don't look too eager when you come over, because this is really for your benefit. Right. So of course he has to do that. But it's. But there's also the oddity of running over. Yeah. Like, as if to tell the mistress that the wife is pregnant or something. I don't know. That doesn't make any sense. But you know what I mean? Like, there's something about it. 28:31 Wes: Yeah. He's more excited, keeps her out with them than with her. 28:35 Erin: Right. 28:36 Wes: And then he goes and gets them and brings them back and they bring wine or champagne or something. 28:40 Erin: Right. That's the thing that is good for her, apparently, not the tannis root. As a pregnant lady, she's drinking her 28:48 Wes: daily martinis like they're in the middle of a kiss. And he cuts that short because he can't wait to tell them about the new baby. So in a way, he's more having it with them than with her. 29:02 Erin: Yeah. I guess the possession makes it work. So it's not really cuckoldry, but he is the, say, the Joseph in this unholy family. Right. And so. And so that doesn't seem to bother. You know, it's strange that that doesn't bother him because he is having the baby with Minnie and Roman, but also she's kind of having the baby a little bit without him. Psychologically, this doesn't seem to be an issue for him in the way that we would think that it would. He's getting so much out of this that I guess it doesn't matter to him. And it seems to me that he's, you know, the reason why he's so close with them is because of the transactional nature of this. Right. Like, he's not getting anything out of Hutch or any of any of Rosemary's friends. And so for him, relationships are transactional. But it's just strange that there is an element of cuckoldry here that isn't really ever dealt with. 29:57 Wes: Psychologically, he turns out to be very disconnected in a way. I'm just thinking of the party at the end. So what does he say to her? They promised me you wouldn't. So Guy comes over to her and he says, would you like a drink? And she asked for a Coca Cola. Is that right? He says, they promised me you wouldn't be hurt. And you haven't been really. Which is just a absurd, terrible thing to say. I mean, supposing you had. Had the baby and lost it, Wouldn't that be the same? And we're getting so much in return. And then she spits at him. 30:32 Erin: I think, yes. Yeah, yeah. 30:34 Wes: You would think if this were. If this were it, if he were just in it for the successful career, he wouldn't need to be at this party. Right. He wouldn't need to be a full fledged member of the cult necessarily. He was just making a deal to get them a baby. But he does seem to be a member as well. But I just was associating to that from this kind of disconnection he has. We don't ever get some strong sense of his burning ambition to succeed as an actor. We get little hints like, I'm off to be famous or whatever. But he, like the other Satanists, don't come across as tortured. Again, in the beginning of the movie, the conflict is conveyed subtly, the conflict between him and Rosemary and whatever inner conflict or turmoil is happening with him. But he seems kind of like a good guy in the beginning of the movie. And yet, on the other hand, it doesn't come as some huge shock that he's shallow enough to have done that. I think maybe that's the way to. There's kind of a banality of evil element here. He does what he does out of shallowness, not out of angst or nefariousness. He's ultimately very disconnected from her, obviously, in her well being. 31:58 Erin: Yeah. But the performance, like the performance that he gives to her is a masterful one. And so that complicates it, of course, but. Yeah, but I love that idea that. Yeah. That it's just pure shallowness which indicates itself that. I don't know. Is there an argument to be made here that truly great actors actually can't be shallow? Maybe there's an argument that shallowness helps in some way, but you know that you need to have some depth to get the part on your own terms. And it's the shallow that have to blind their competition. 32:34 Wes: Did you see the sequel called look at what Happened to Rosemary's Baby, also known as Rosemary's Baby Part two? 32:44 Erin: Part two, the Toddler Years. 32:46 Wes: Made for television. Masterpiece. 32:51 Erin: No, I have not seen it. I'm interested in that apartment 7Amaybe that the prequel with Terry. Yeah, that sounds like it's the only thing that has a moderate IMDb rating, if I had to guess. 33:03 Wes: But Ruth Gordon is in this and this. Look at. Look at what happened to Rosemary's Baby. 33:09 Erin: Oh, shoot. Look at what happened to Ruth Gordon. That's what you know, you get a resurgence. You get Harold and Maude and then they just cast you in TV sequels. 33:18 Wes: It's got 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah. It's all about little Satan trying to trials and trying to go to a New York fancy New York school, get educated enough so he can go to Harvard and. 33:36 Erin: I've seen this movie. 33:38 Wes: Yeah, become president. 33:41 Erin: Exactly. 33:44 Wes: The would be am just looking at Wikipedia. The would be Antichrist finds himself constantly manipulated by members of his family and by a newfound love interest. 33:55 Erin: Oh no. Is he torn. 33:56 Wes: What's the point of being the Antichrist if you're just gonna get bullied by everybody? Everyone. 34:02 Erin: That is so funny. Oh my gosh. 34:06 Wes: There's no amount of divinity or anti divinity which is going to make adolescence any better. 34:12 Erin: Well, maybe the problem is that he's only half and half. Right. Because he's half Rosemary and half Satan. 34:19 Wes: Or is he thirds? Is he part guy, part Rosemary? How does it work? 34:24 Erin: There we go. 34:26 Wes: Or no, I would. 25% guy. 25% Satan, half Rosemary. 34:30 Erin: That's right. Well, 25% makeup and then. 34:34 Wes: Yeah, so if you're 25% Satan, God, it just seems like it's. You got all the drawbacks and none of the power. 34:43 Erin: That's right. That's right. 34:46 Wes: Over the 20 years later, an adult Adrian and his best friend Peter are detained by police for speeding. 34:52 Erin: Peter, of course he has a best friend. Peter 34:58 Wes: detained for speeding, confronted by his aunt over his reckless behavior. This is just. It's hilarious. 35:05 Erin: Oh God. 35:08 Wes: It's not easy being Satan. 35:09 Erin: Behave yourself, baby. Satan. 35:11 Wes: It's not easy being young Satan. 35:13 Erin: And what's Ruth Gordon doing? Just sending him checks for his birthday or what? 35:19 Wes: Bringing him mousse. Yeah, mousse. And drinks. Later that night, Roman and Minnie arrive at the casino pretending to be Adrian's aunt and uncle. Minnie drugs Adrian into unconsciousness and dresses him up in a costume and devil makeup. 35:37 Erin: How are they still alive? Wasn't Roman 79 and had terminal cancer? Yeah, we never talked about that. Is that true? And why did they leave? But they don't leave. 35:48 Wes: No, cancer's cancer is faked. And they. They're feigning leaving because Rosemary insists that they cut off contact with them. 35:58 Erin: Right, okay. 35:59 Wes: Because she's spooked. 36:00 Erin: I knew that. 36:00 Wes: And then Saperstein comes up with this plan. Okay, so Ralph Bellamy. I just. I kind of thought he was kind of unrecognizable as Saperstein, but maybe I'm not used to seeing him old, but. 36:13 Erin: Yeah, there's that other movie that he's in that I have his old face in my head from. What is it? I'm looking it up. Right. Trading Places. 36:20 Wes: Oh, right. 36:21 Erin: Cause he's the villain and. 36:22 Wes: Yeah, great movie. 36:23 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. He's good at playing either the dumb, innocent hick or the most evil person in the history of the world. 36:32 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. As a hick, he is so dumb and sweet. Sweet and innocent. 36:37 Erin: Sort of. There's an insidious quality there. I still think more so in the Awful Truth, but. 36:43 Wes: Yeah, More so in what? 36:45 Erin: In the Awful Truth than in his Girl Friday. But there is something. There's some. Some undercurrent there that they pick up on later. Same thing happened with Jimmy Stewart. You know, there was always like an undercurrent of something. And then he comes back from the war, and then he's doing Anatomy of a Murder and Rope and, you know, various things where he's playing a. Either a straight up villain or someone who's compromised because there's, like, this undertaste. I'd call it chalky undertaste. 37:12 Wes: All right, thank you. 37:13 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

On the surface, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the Devil. In the end, it seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition, and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Wes & Erin discuss Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal. Upcoming Episodes: Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “An Indian to His Love.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: On the surface, Rosemary's Baby is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the devil in the end. It seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Today we discuss Roman Polanski's 1968 classic and why it is that satanic evil, when confronted with life's very frightening realities, including pregnancy itself, turns out to be so banal. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So I think I first saw this film in 2016, and I hadn't watched it before, even though it was a classic, because I'm not into horror films. And then I watched it and I realized, well, it's not really a horror film. It's kind of satire masquerading as horror. And I found it really delightful. I'd say it's one of my favorites. Yeah. So the question is, if it's not really about getting knocked up by the devil, then what is it really about? 1:46 Erin: Good question. 1:47 Wes: Yeah. What's your history with this movie? 1:49 Erin: I saw it in maybe high school or college first, so I must have seen it earlier than. Than you, which makes me happy that I saw a 60s movie before you did. You know, my attraction to the film was, I guess, what you might call the satanic attraction, because I love all the actors in it, the old actors and John Cassavetes, of course. But, you know, Ruth Gordon is. 2:12 Wes: She's great. 2:13 Erin: She's my style icon. 2:14 Wes: And then Ralph Bellamy, I thought, oh, Ralph Bellamy. 2:18 Erin: There's even a Ralph Bellamy joke, what I interpret as a Ralph Bellamy joke in the film. Do you know what I'm saying? Referring to. This is such a deep cut. 2:26 Wes: They have a few of these jokes in the film. What is the Bellamy joke? 2:31 Erin: I take the Victoria Vetri. You look like that actress Victoria Vetri, and she really is played by that actress. 2:37 Wes: Okay, well, that's the one that I was aware of. 2:39 Erin: Yeah. 2:40 Wes: Yeah. 2:41 Erin: I was like, you can't Have a movie with Ralph Bellamy in it and do that joke and not have it be sort of in. 2:47 Wes: Of course. 2:47 Erin: Yeah. 2:48 Wes: What's the movie in which that happens? 2:51 Erin: His Girl Friday. 2:52 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. 2:53 Erin: Which is itself sort of referencing the fact that he was in the Awful Truth, also with Cary Grant. 2:59 Wes: So the familiarity, layers upon layers upon layers. 3:06 Erin: Yeah. So I saw it in maybe late high school or college, and I've watched it. I think I watched it on Halloween maybe five, seven years ago, something like that. And now for this. And I had forgotten how much I loved it. So I. I'm really excited to talk about. It's hilarious. It's so funny. 3:23 Wes: It is really funny. 3:24 Erin: Ruth Gordon is. This is maybe like one of my favorite best Supporting actor Oscar wins or actress, I should say. Oscar wins. Yeah. So what do I think it's about? I kind of think it's about acting. Hmm. 3:35 Wes: Okay. 3:36 Erin: Partially. It's also about the story of a woman who finds faith in the most unexpected way. Just a story of religious conversion. It's beautiful. 3:48 Wes: To Satanism. 3:50 Erin: That's a religion. She was a lapsed Catholic. Now she's practicing. 3:59 Wes: Oh, the bar is so low these days. 4:01 Erin: Well, I know. It's like, is God dead? No, but he's very old, and he desperately needs new blood to come into the congregation. The other side's old too, and they just need new recruits. It's like, you know. 4:12 Wes: Well, they're supposed to be against organized religion, but they are quite organized, aren't they? 4:16 Erin: Yeah. I take that to be a mask or an act. I don't know. I suppose it could be taken both ways. Right. Because they would have to be pretty anti. Anti Catholic. So perhaps they're against that organized religion. But they seem to be otherwise pretty. Pretty devout. They're all in. They're fanatics. 4:37 Wes: Is it worse to be a Satanist or a nihilist? Sounds like it's worse to be a nihilist. 4:44 Erin: I think so. I might be, you know, one of the. 4:47 Wes: In. 4:48 Erin: In CCD or one of these things. You know, you're. You're always told as a little kid that every religion has some truth in it. Right. And so there's always the kid that goes, oh, yeah, what about Satanism? And then the priest goes, no, there's. There's like they believe in the devil and they have to have the Eucharist for their. For their rituals or else it doesn't work. So they actually believe in the true presence. But. Yeah, so Satanism is probably, as a religion, is probably truer than nihilism. 5:18 Wes: Yeah. I love that. What you get out of this movie is a vindication of religion. It's not. Not something that occurred to me. Yep. So the way I always took it, and I wrote like, a little mini review in 2016 when I saw it. Well, I took them to be newlyweds, which I'm not, I guess. Are they newlyweds? 5:38 Erin: I don't know. 5:39 Wes: Or are they just moving? Maybe they're. 5:40 Erin: I don't think so. They're just moving because Hutch is their landlord. 5:45 Wes: But before they've had children. So early. Early on, I guess, in the marriage. And she's so young to get a divorce from Frank Sinatra. And apparently this movie was one of the factors. He didn't want her to work, and he had her. He served divorce papers on set. I'm sure you know all this stuff, but, yeah, pretty nasty. 6:04 Erin: This ended up being the subject of conversation last night among friends. We were talking about Rosemary's Baby, and it ended up just talking about Frank Sinatra's absurd sexual history. But anyway. Yeah. 6:14 Wes: Yeah. So I. I took this to be about, well, I call it nascent marital life early on in the marriage, where things are still getting going, and this kind of ordinary conflict between domesticity and ambition. So he has ambitions as an actor, and she will complain at a certain point about not getting attention from him. And ultimately, she wants a family. So you get very. You get subtle hints of that, even from the very. In the first three minutes. There's so much subtle exposition that happens so brilliantly, so masterfully. Right. So he's asked the guy showing them in the apartment, asks him if he's a doctor, and he lies and says, yes, and she says, no, he's an actor. And then he lies about what he's been in. It turns out he hasn't been in much, and he's kind of sold out for commercials, but it looks like he's not making a bunch of money. The movie seems to try to sell that apartment as decrepit and small or something. It's huge in the Dakota building, but whatever. So it seems to be that he's sold out. He's not as successful as he wants to be. And so it sets us up for this Faustian bargain that he makes. And then you get this intrusion into this beginning of an ordinary marital conflict. You get this intrusion of eccentric neighbors. And this kind of reminded me of the Graduate in a way, where you have older people glomming on to the optimism and possibility of youth. And then there's pregnancy and everything that comes with that. And then how bizarre that is when you think about it, the way human beings reproduce. And then I thought of alien there and how you. You could always turn pregnancy and birth into a kind of horror show of some sort. You can always pivot off of that. But in the end, I thought isn't interesting. It kind of captures the conventionality of people trying to be unconventional. I thought it's like, okay, it's almost like a satire on swingers. Right. You show up to the swingers party and it's not a bunch of young, beautiful people. It's just a bunch of old people who are trying. Not that I've ever been to a swingers party, by the way. 8:28 Erin: Come on. 8:30 Wes: They wouldn't let me in. But from what I've heard, or that's 8:35 Erin: what they say about nude beaches. People on the nude beach that are nude are never the ones you want to be nude. 8:41 Wes: Exactly. So, yeah, it's people having a midlife crisis or after midlife crisis, wanting to recapture their youth and wanting to be unconventional, which is really, in a way, what Satanism ultimately represents. Right. The kind of rebellion against boring convention. But then they just become. They're, in a way, it just becomes another form of conventionality and ordinariness. There's no escape, I guess, in a sense, from age. And that's partly, I guess, what Satanism is supposed to be as well. Right. An escape from mortality. 9:16 Erin: I love that. I think that's great. Yeah. Because of the parodic nature of so much of Satanism you have built in this idea that it's only ever just a reflection. Right. So Satan or the Antichrist still needs to come into the world in the same way that Christ came in. You know, Antichrist itself obviously has that implication. So I need not say more, but. Yeah. The mundanity of Satanism and of this arrangement that they have, I think is just an excellent point. Yeah. You know, you go into the Castevet's apartment and it's dark versus Rosemary lightening up her apartment. And then at the end, you know, you have the bassinet that's covered with black instead of white. You know, you have the upside down cross. Yeah. It's quite boring. It's just this one to one ratio or this color scheme of white versus black. Just, you know, there are no like rainbow colors in between. I mean, the only rainbow colors really come From like the 60s wardrobes, which are awesome. But so you think that they're. Yeah. That they're really eccentric and fascinating people and Ultimately, it's sort of reductive or reducible to this kind of binary. I like that a lot. I was thinking about what the implications for this might be as, say, a parable of new Hollywood. One of the acting angles that I thought of, you know, you have to. If you're a young up and coming actor or a director like Roman Polanski, then, you know, you have to make deals with these crotchety old people that have been running things for a long time who are all connected, right? Who are all insiders. And you have to do unpleasant things in order to get in with them, maybe. Or you have to pay homage to them in some way, which we could talk a little bit more about later. But, you know, I'm on this rewatch. I was really fascinated by Guy and by Cassavetes performance, which is when you watch him in the background, you realize kind of how uncomfortable he is. And that opening scene that you, that you were talking about when the Guy's showing them their apartment, who is from the Maltese Falcon and the Big Sleep and a bunch of other. He's a veteran actor from a bunch of 40s film noir. When he asks him if he's a doctor and then Rosemary has to correct him and say he's an actor. He asks Guy if he's seen him in anything. And then the second joke is that he's Richard Burton. He says, well, I did Hamlet a while back, didn't I, Liz? And then the Sandpiper. So the joke is that he's Richard Burton and she's Elizabeth Taylor. And I had never picked up on that before. 11:47 Wes: He calls her Liz. Okay? 11:49 Erin: He calls her Liz. And so it's a Burton Taylor joke. But that became the cipher through which I read their relationship. Actually. I wondered if there was actually a significant amount of jealousy on his side of the relationship. You know, we see Rosemary being quite. I don't know that we could call her jealous, but she certainly. She's not getting, as you, as you point out, she's not getting attention from him and she's not being treated well by him and he has to keep apologizing to her. So it seems on the one hand that she is the needy one, the grasping one, the one without the career, the one who stays at home, the one who's quite vulnerable versus, you know, Cassavetes to me is quite. He's very handsome. He has this like rugged quality to him. It's not self sufficient though, because there's this anxiety at the base of his personality ultimately as an actor, which Makes him really interesting. But, you know, the more I thought about this Burton Taylor thing, the more that that kind of started to reverse for me. He says, I did Hamlet a while back and then the Sandpiper. That represents a pretty significant fall from grace for Richard Burton, who of course famously, you know, hooks up with Elizabeth Taylor and ends up spending all of his time being a jet setter with her, abandoning his dreams of becoming the next Olivier. You know, it's exactly the Antony and Cleopatra parallel. And I think that even at this point it would have been well known that that was the, that the trajectory of his career was one of disappointment, one of maybe having sold out a little bit. You know, I wouldn't want to paint that, the whole dynamic of their relationship as being one of his jealousy of her. But I think there was a problem. I think there was a streak of that through their relationship. What I'm wary of in applying this reading to Rosemary and Guy is something reducible to just, you know, he's an actor, he wants to come up with all of these personae. He wants to be able to, you know, to create new lives inside his own. So of course he would be jealous of a woman and of course pregnancy would be the sort of like bone of contention. And that seems like relatively boring to me. What I'm more interested in is the glimpses that we get of his acting, which seems to me to be pretty bad. He's kind of a bad actor. I mean, he's a great actor in life. He's a great actor when it comes to deceiving Rosemary. But when we see him rehearsing for the play, when we see him in the Yamaha commercial, he's awful. You know, it's very, very bad versus Rosemary. Those moments when she talks to herself or she has these kinds of self aware moments in the mirror, you know, when she holds up the charm and says, tannis anyone? And it's quite an imaginative. To me. It's, you know, it's a very charming moment. And so there seems to be something. I don't know, I just, I just. Sorry, I'm throwing a lot at you, but basically I'm trying to find a way that this reading works that isn't the conventional sort of like man jealous of woman because woman can get pregnant. Which seems to me to be pretty boring. 14:45 Wes: Yeah, you've preempted the point that I was going to make and. 14:48 Erin: Oh, I'm sorry. 14:49 Wes: Thought that was profound. 14:52 Erin: No, no, no, make it. 14:54 Wes: You're right that it is an. We've Talked about this many times on this podcast. Right. So male creative ambition is always suspect. We can always direct at it the suspicion that it is imbued, at least with some envy of female procreativity. See, there's a fancy way to say it that makes it sound less boring and ordinary, but. And then just to drill down on that a little bit, creativity is about replications, right? So there's. There's procreativity, which is creativity in its most primal sense, except perhaps for God's creativity and creating the world. But art typically involves mimesis of one sort or another, which is a kind of replication. And the same thing with acting. Right. He's creating another person when he acts. So that detail, you know, of a. Was something I hadn't thought about before you talked about acting. And I think the point about Guy's discomfort is a good one. I noticed this, too. So he often will have. When he's not talking, when something else is going on, he'll have a preoccupied or disturbed look on his face, and then he'll come out of that and make a joke and sometimes trying to act like he's reassuring Rosemary about something. If you're not paying attention, you might just think, oh, he's a jokey, fun guy. But you get, repeatedly get this contrast in the movie between him being. Yeah. Quite moody in the background and then being jokey on the surface. Where's Cassavetes, by the way, in his career at this point? And why is there. This seems to be another inside joke where the couple, Roman and Minnie are cast the Cassavetes. 16:36 Erin: Right. And Roman. Yeah, it's early for him still. He hasn't gotten to, say A Woman under the influence, which was 74. And that was, I think, the most commercial and critical success that he had had up to that point because of its accidental fame. I think I told this story on our. On our podcast episode on that film. It ended up actually getting nominated for Oscars and actually getting some attention paid to it, which was unusual. So that I think, would probably be considered the apex of his career. But, of course, prior to this, he was in the Dirty Dozen. He's a, you know, he's a regular working actor in order to be able to fund his own projects. And he's been a director for quite a while up to this point. So that's one of the. I was going to say, you know, with the many documented cases of his butting heads with Roman Polanski, it's kind of like how doctors make the worst patients. So it's funny that the whole thing begins with a doctor joke. But anyway, it's also a matter of, 17:34 Wes: well, why was he butting heads with Polanski? 17:36 Erin: They're directorial styles. Polanski is extremely. I mean, there's no word for it, but anal compared to Cassavetes style, which is, you know, he wanted to improvise and just go with the flow of a scene. And he was, I guess, pretty uncomfortable in the part. Didn't like Polanski's method of acting. And then there was this anecdote, which has since become quite famous that Mia Farrow wrote in her autobiography where Polanski and Cassavetes were talking about, I don't know, maybe the marriage, the context, I don't remember. Maybe it's never supplied. But Polanski says something like, oh, of course, you know, any monogamous relationship is doomed to fail because men can't be sexually attracted to a woman for any extended length of time. And Cassavetes flew into a rage over this and basically said, like, you know nothing about women. You know nothing about relationships. Like, if anything, I'm more attracted to my wife as time goes on. And it's one of the many reasons why. Why we. We love John Cassavetes. Cassavetes may have been the villain in the film on screen, but certainly not behind the scenes. 18:41 Wes: It's interesting. Yeah. From what I read, Polanski could do as many as 50 takes or often was doing something like 50 takes, which is just crazy, right? 18:51 Erin: That's totally nuts. Yeah. Going over budget, almost delaying Kubrick levels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 18:58 Wes: Did you have a theory? Do we know? I guess I could have tried to look this up, but I didn't. Do we know why? If there's an inside joke on Cassavetes and what that means. 19:06 Erin: Yeah. I mean, it's in the novel. 19:08 Wes: Oh, it is. So it's just a coincidence, then? 19:11 Erin: It's a coincidence. But it's one of those things that is so creepy. The Victoria Vetri joke is in the novel. 19:18 Wes: That's hilarious. 19:19 Erin: And then they got her to put it. But it's Piper Laurie. It's Piper Laurie. So it's a different type entirely. And then when they cast it, I think they added in, you know, so the joke isn't that she's really Piper Laurie, of course, but there is an element of identifying the woman with an actress, and I think that's important. And so they carry that through and then make it even more meta, which is great. There's a meta element that's baked into the book, it seems, before it even comes on screen. Like it's sort of meant to be a film and the film is supposed to be. So I've never read the book. I should. But the film is supposed to be one of the most faithful film adaptations of a novel ever. They took so many pains to even recreate color schemes I read, and just crazy stuff like they're even. I think there's even a. I read this last night and I didn't double check, but Cassavetes at one point is holding a radio or a tape recorder or something like that in one scene. And it's because a scene which was not in the film but which was in the novel with a going away party. He gets this as a present from Roman. When Roman and his wife are leaving for Europe, they have a going away party. They give a guy this, whatever it is, and he's holding it in the following scene when they say goodbye. So even though that wasn't in the film, like they take pains to reproduce everything that goes on even interstitially in the novel. So it's extremely meticulous. 20:41 Wes: Yeah. Apparently Polanski, he read the book in one night and then had the screenplay done three weeks later. It's pretty impressive. What a work ethic. Another thing I think I thought of when I saw it years ago was that there's something in here about the concept of character. And I think I was thinking at first about Minnie and Ruth Gordon and her. Yeah, such an interesting, quirky kind of character. But then I thought, well, there's something paranormal about character in general, in the sense that it's kind of a window into the unconscious. Well, let's put it this way. A lot of it reflects early formative forces, that's the theory. And defensive structures against the instinctual. So what's hidden in an instinctual comes out and character is revealed in a. In a different way. And sometimes. And it can look odd, it could look perverse or, you know, that would be a more obvious example. Or it comes out in these sorts of quirks that you notice, say, in Minnie. And in a way, you know, you could. You can read Satanism as a attempt to liberate those forces. In other words, it's anti civilizational. This is about civilization and its discontents. And so instinct and the instinctual get covered up by character and repression and all that stuff. The Satanist project is to liberate them. But of course, if we didn't have character, then there'd be no point in making films and Having all these great actors, there'd be no Minnie in all her quirkiness because the instinct would just radiate out like light from the sun. It wouldn't get caught up in anything any more interesting structure. It'd just be dissipated. 22:28 Erin: So you're saying that. Let me just make sure I understand this, that Satanism would liberate us to be free to express those forces. And that these character actors who are famously quirky and stuff like that, that this is an expression of this kind of force being unleashed. No, or, or the opposite. 22:46 Wes: We can read, we can read Satanism as, you know, a form of discontent with civilization. 22:53 Erin: Yeah, right. 22:53 Wes: So they complain about organized religion. They're complaining about. The complaint is ultimately about the concept of the good and the way it binds us or the law and the way it binds us. It by it inhibits us and prevents us from doing everything we might want to do. Or it creates dependency. So speaking of envy, like in a way, I think this is the problem of Milton's Satan. It's played up for a lot of laughs because Satan just doesn't, doesn't want to be second in line. He doesn't want to be God's right hand man. And he recognizes, hopefully we'll do Paradise Lost one day. But he recognizes that he's dependent on God as any creature is dependent on the Creator. And it's a fixed relationship. It's like an ontological relationship like property being dependent on substance. And so fighting God is as ridiculous as a property fighting substance because it's the very thing you depend on. If the substance disappears, the property disappears. If you defeat God, you defeat existence and you defeat yourself. So I think the same thing with the good in general. People are often self destructive because they don't want to be dependent on something good outside of them. So they destroy it. That dependency is just too unbearable and anxiety producing. So my point was that if you read Satanism as in a way this disaffection with all the forces that run counter to instinct, then in a way it's ironically anti character as well. Because character is a. Is in many ways an expression of all those formative forces. Whether it's civilization or what's transferred through parenting or any other environmental stuff, it kind of accrues and sediments in our psyche and makes us who we are. So just as right, Milton's Satan is rebelling against the concept of a formative force. So on my reading are these Satanists. And to do so is to rebel against the very concept of character. And I think you can read, you know, Oedipus in this way. You can. You can. Like, this would run through a lot of different texts. I think you mentioning acting made me think of that, because in a way, acting is all about character and the replication of character. Right. So guy wants. He's a bad actor, and he wants to take a shortcut by doing the Faustian bargain, which involves, I guess, sickening people who are competing for parts with you rather than just becoming a better actor. Better at character. 25:33 Erin: Yeah. Why not just. Just become a better actor. 25:39 Wes: It's so simple. 25:40 Erin: Yeah. 25:41 Wes: It's practice. 25:42 Erin: This is the principle that 21st century America is based on. You're saying that it's ironic that Ruth Gordon is a Satanist because God is what has made her Ruth Gordon. I love that. 25:53 Wes: Okay, that's. Yeah, that's a more succinct. Much more succinct way of putting it. 25:57 Erin: No, I'm trying to. I'm trying to understand. 25:59 Wes: That's good. 25:59 Erin: Well, you know, one of the. Well, you know, one of the things that you're revealing to me, I thought. I wondered about the Victoria Vetri, whatever her name is, Terry, character, why she was their first choice, why Rosemary is their second choice. I think it's because they're both lapsed Catholics, and this is part of this satanic rebellion or this rebellion against the thing that forms you. I mean, they both have to be lapsed Catholics. We know Rosemary is. We can infer that Terry is. Because much is made of her being Italian. So that's why it has to be Victoria Vetri and not Piper Laurie. Right. So we know that she's Italian, and we know that she's somehow become a dope addict who had to be literally picked up off the sidewalk. It's a short trip. 26:42 Wes: I love that. 26:43 Erin: To and from the sidewalk. 26:44 Wes: Once you know what's gonna happen to her. That. 26:47 Erin: Yes, exactly. 26:48 Wes: On a second watching that, that joke becomes very funny. 26:50 Erin: Right, right. 26:51 Wes: They picked me up right off the sidewalk. 26:53 Erin: What's dope again? Which one is that? Is that cocaine or. 26:56 Wes: I think it's anything. 26:58 Erin: It's anything. Oh, okay. Yeah. 26:59 Wes: Wow. You really are of a different generation. 27:03 Erin: Well, dope people. Oh, God. Isn't that a Liz Lemon thing? And when Carrie Fisher is going, oh, we did blow in Joe Garagiola's office. And she's like, which one is blow again? That's right. Okay. I was like, where am I getting that? 27:17 Wes: Maybe it's more specific. I always thought of it as just 27:19 Erin: drugs, but just drugs in general. Okay. Well, anyway, so she's a drug addict of some kind. 27:25 Wes: A slang word. I'm looking it up for cocaine, cannabis, heroin, opioid. All right, I'm gonna take that as a vindication. 27:31 Erin: But a dope fiend is the expression. And fiendishness seems so. Oh, specific. Right. You'd have to be a fiend about one particular drug. 27:40 Wes: Yeah. 27:41 Erin: You'd be a fiend about everything. 27:42 Wes: Hopefully. You just choose one, you know, maybe. 27:45 Erin: Oh, okay. 27:46 Wes: You could choose a few, but then just have one would be your main one. It's not monogamy, but it is polyamory, I guess. 27:56 Erin: Right. Yeah. So it seems to me that they then have to choose lapsed Catholics. But unfortunately for them, what they don't realize is that once a Catholic, always a Catholic. The very structure of your dreams will betray the influence of these formative forces. If we're going to take character, what you're describing as character, to include the very things that make Catholicism such a popular subject in horror films because they have so much. Because Catholicism has so much character, because it has all the smells and bells and the outfits and the props. You know, it has all the props. So these things I don't know if I'm wrong to associate with character, but I am. And I think that that's the. That's like the key here is that, you know, arguably, like, the very theatricality of Catholicism and its materiality and then the rebellion from that, or, say, lapsing from that, which is a soft rebellion, would seem to mark both of these women as potentially good Satanists. Catholicism seems to me to be the thing that you get the most purchase out of rebelling against. Because if your problem is rebelling against the formative forces and what you're describing as character is part of that, that's the juiciest place to rebel against. Like, if you rebel against some religion that's like, iconoclastic, then what are you rebelling against? You know, just going to a different white room, you know, like, you have to be able to tear things down. Right. And there's nothing to tear down with some other religion. Yeah. 29:33 Wes: And Catholicism is more connected to, you know, ancient history as well, which is scarier. It's earlier. And of course, form, you know, also has a significance as formative historically. So we are the heirs of that tradition, whether we like it or not, whether we're Catholics or not. Catholicism has imprinted itself on Western civilization. 29:56 Erin: Sure. I think of it as being relatively young, actually, in the grand scheme of things. But, yes, you're right. Really. 30:03 Wes: It's not that. 30:04 Erin: Yeah, I mean, Judaism is so much older and, you know. Well, that's true paganism and Hinduism. But I just want to check that I'm right to associate what you're describing as character with these elements of the church. 30:18 Wes: Yeah, I think so. 30:19 Erin: Okay. And so this seems to be what Minnie and Roman are talking about when they're talking about the Pope. That it's all about appearance, that it's all about, I don't know, making money or acting. It's all about acting, actually is. You know, they accuse the Pope of being an actor, basically. I don't remember exactly what they say, 30:38 Wes: but that's a very good point because it reflects the fact that they don't appreciate character and the significance of character and its depth. Right, yeah. It's all just superficial. Very good point. 30:49 Erin: He says that's showbiz. Roman says this. That's exactly what it is. All the costumes, rituals, all religions. Yeah. But especially. Especially the one with all the costumes. Right. Then Rosemary actually is uncomfortable. Right. At many points. This out. Oh, that he pretends he's holy. You know, what do they spend on robes and jewels? This is an. This is another thing that, you know, it's all just this money. If they spent all their money that they spend on all these robes and jewels that, you know, there's very, very familiar criticisms. And it's right after this that there's a very, very quick turn to guy and to acting. Right. A good picture of the hypocrisy behind organized religion was given in Luther. Did you ever get to play that leading part? Guys, of course, they're fans of Luther, 31:40 Wes: you know, so Luther is like one. I don't want to get in trouble. What? I mean, he accuses the Pope of being a Satanist, essentially, but. 31:49 Erin: Right, right. But it's the same. The exact same critique. They're making a Luther esque critique here. And then we hear, my father was a theatrical producer. So it's like, pick a lane, you know, are you anti Catholicism? Are you pro Catholicism? Your father was a theatrical producer and you hate theatrics anyway. Yeah. So there's a sort of inherent contradiction, I think, going on there. But. Yeah, but the criticism of religion and then the acting go hand in hand. And of course, Mia Farrow has this, you know, vestigial attachment where she said, well, he is the Pope. You know, she has this respect that she can't get rid of because, of course, it's Catholicism changes your brain. You dream about nuns for the rest of your Life, whether you're Catholic or not. 32:32 Wes: Yeah, I just. Yeah. I like this point about acting and religion in their minds going hand in hand and being something superficial and. But it's interesting, right? So they're criticizing the concept of ritual as well. But the Satanists are very into rituals. 32:48 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And that's what makes this so confusing because I don't think they're, you know, I think that they have a great 32:53 Wes: respect for acting too and they're such great characters. So. Yeah, I think it's just gonna be. They don't know themselves very well. 33:03 Erin: Right. 33:03 Wes: And this may be part of the point that you're making when you, you know, when you see it just as a vindication of their religious impulses. You know, they are fulfilling their religious impulses even as they act out this supposedly anti religious sentiment and they are indulging character even as they act out this anti character sentiment. 33:25 Erin: Hmm. I wonder too if you know, Ruth Gordon's line readings, as Minnie are just this flood of words and this idea that they don't know themselves very well seems to me to be related to that. Like she's a very. Maybe something that gives people character is this kind of not knowing themselves thing because they, they're not aware of any oddities in their behavior or they're sort of distracted by their own behavior. Right. If they, if they were more aware of their behavior, they might eliminate certain, you know, they might train themselves out of certain things in order to be more. What, regular? More closer to some sort of mean that they, that they believe to be a behavioral ideal. 34:06 Wes: Well, you might, yeah, you might see her as a very. Not repressed kind of person. Right. Minnie. She's. She's impulsive in a way. And yeah, the way she reads her lines, I'd like this image of a flood of words. It's like run on sentences almost. Yeah. I don't know what's, what's the word for this type of character in a person? I mean, she's disinhibited. She's. It's almost childlike. Right. The way, the way her labile, that's another fancy word. Her. Any change of, you know, fluctuating mood or emotion from minute, from second to second gets conveyed. And it can be conveyed in a single speech. No single line where, you know, you could see, see fluctuations and valence just, just within, you know, a few, A few sentences. 35:02 Erin: So she's sort of a force of nature. A pint sized force of nature. 35:08 Wes: And it's very charming, of course. And so there's a lot of, you know, I guess there's a lot of room in that for the sublimation of instinct. And, you know, maybe I'm. The way I've painted characters a little bit simplistic as all these kind of static defensive structures that keep instinct at bay, you know, really, really. It's a way of satisfying instinct as well. And then someone like her, I think the point you're getting at is very unrefined. Certainly she's not a repressed person at all. 35:39 Erin: Right. She's reacting openly to everything all the time. But at the same time, you get the sense because of the speed and the quick darts and everything, she's not, like, listening to herself. You know, it's just coming out, but she's not listening. And yet at the same time, I mean, that's what we think. Right. In fact, there's a great deal of calculation in what she says. I mean, first of all, this very delivery is designed to steamroll Rosemary. 36:05 Wes: Yeah. And we see her do a lot of calculating things, and she's nosy and she's. Yeah, she's constantly. 36:12 Erin: She gets the info she needs investigating. 36:14 Wes: Yeah. 36:15 Erin: Right. And so it sounds as though it's just this stream of consciousness thing, but in fact, she's asking questions that are designed to pinpoint exactly what she needs to know. 36:25 Wes: And that, you know, it occurs to me now that none of these Satanists are very dark. Right. They are super, super ordinary. And when Guy and Rosemary first get to the apartment, we hear them bickering through the walls like any old couple. I mean, ultimately, a lot of the bickering is going to be about, you know, the project of Satanism, how it's going. You know, I guess they bicker about Terry. You know, we kind of learn that. Is that the way that we learned that Terry was. Yeah. That she was going to be the. The birth mother for Satan? I think we learned that through the wall, right, with the bickering. 37:02 Erin: Yes. 37:02 Wes: Yeah. 37:03 Erin: Only in hindsight. Of course. 37:04 Wes: Yeah, only in hindsight. 37:06 Erin: Yeah. 37:06 Wes: Yeah. 37:07 Erin: On a second watch, when Terry says that they. That she thought at first that they wanted her for some kind of sex thing, I was like, oh, yeah, they did. Yeah, exactly. They are sickos. 37:19 Wes: But they don't. Yeah. Again, and this is my whole swinger. The point of my whole swingers comment is that none of them are. Seem to have any element of, like, diabolical evil or they're not. Right. There's no dark backstory as there would be in, say, a. For a super villain. In a comic book movie, you know, there's no, oh, didn't the Joker have had a bad life? And he was teased and now he's full of resentment and angst. They're not angst ridden people. They belong to the cult, it seems, in the way that most people would just belong to some congregation because it's there and they. It's, you know, it's what they do. It's maybe a family tradition or whatever. 38:03 Erin: That's right. Yeah, they're born into it. My parents were Satanists, so I am too. 38:07 Wes: Yeah, I think they're not. They're not born into it, but it seems somehow an ordinary extension of a mundane existence. 38:15 Erin: But they are born into it. His father is the. 38:18 Wes: Yeah, they are born into it. 38:19 Erin: The hope of Satanism or whatever. 38:21 Wes: Well, who knows the backstory for all the other congregants, but like Laura, what's her name? Laura? 38:27 Erin: Laura Louise. 38:28 Wes: Lara. Laura Louise, yeah. She should be working in a DMV somewhere, making people's lives hell. Not. 38:42 Erin: Oh, man. Yeah. Patsy Kelly, great actress. What they're arguing about through the wall, I took a note up on this and I found it. It's Minnie reprimanding Roman for not doing what she said to do. So she argued for not telling Terry. She knew that she wouldn't be open minded, she says, and she wonders how Roman is the leader of anything. And so. Yeah, so you think that it's going to be. Yeah, it could be that they're bickering about, I told you not to do that and you went and did it, you know, but it's actually about this. It's about, I guess, revealing to Terry, which is why she kills herself, I guess, that they are Satanists. You know, we could connect this to, as we already are, ordinary marital bickering. But there's also about how to play the scene. Roman's choices as a director were not the right ones. Minnie was rebelling against his directorship and saying, this is not how the scene should go. The information should not be revealed in this act or something like that. So there is something, I think, quite actory about. About the whole thing. And I just want to point out too, because otherwise I'll forget that. Also in the basement, when Terry talks about the Castevets and how wonderful they are, Rosemary responds by saying that she's glad that there are people like that. When you hear so much about apathy and people that are afraid of getting involved, and I love that because of course, they're not. They're devout, they're not apathetic at all. Right. So, like, somehow the opposite of devotion isn't apathy here. It's devotion in the. It's devotion in support of a cause that's the opposite of the cause that you're supporting. Right? Yeah. So it's Terry and Rosemary that then seem to mark themselves as the apathetic ones that are going to be converted. It's like they have to choose an apathetic host who's not going to have a devout opinion one way or the other and be transformed. 40:27 Wes: Yeah, we can talk about that in the. In the second part, Rosemary's apathy and her passivity and all that, her waifishness, even though they were gonna go a different direction initially, you're reminding me of how much in the movie is only evident in hindsight or on a second watching. And I think when I first watched this, I didn't. I think it was unclear to me until the very end. I hadn't made a decision about whether all this was all in her head or not. And then I wondered on second viewing. Well, isn't it obvious it's not in her head. But anyway, maybe we can lead with that in the second part. 41:03 Erin: That's great. 41:04 Wes: Get your thoughts on that. All right. You can listen to that second part right away. patreon.com subtextpodcast 41:16 Erin: thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine. Upcoming Episodes: “Rosemary’s Baby,” Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”). Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part four of our four part series on the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part three, we just got done talking about there's a certain slant of light and now we're going to cover for our Last poem, number 315. He fumbles at your soul, so I'll go ahead and read it. He fumbles at your soul as players at the keys before they drop full music on. He stuns you by degrees, prepares your brittle nature for the ethereal blow by fainter hammers further heard, then nearer, then so slow your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul. When winds take forests in their paws, the universe is still. So this is a wild one. It's a Shakespearean sonnet or an English sonnet, one of the few that she has sprinkled around her works. And yeah, it doesn't look like or feel like a sonnet at first. So I think when I texted you about how I wanted to do this one, I was like, it's a sonnet. Maybe when you first looked at it, you immediately discovered that. But it took me a second when I, I was introduced to this poem. 1:54 Wes: No. Yeah, I didn't. 1:55 Erin: Yeah. And there's some really cool stuff going on formally here that I could talk about. But one of the things is just, you know, we start with soul. We have the final couplet separated out from the rest of the poem. So we have this 12 line stanza and then the final couplet isolated. And in the 12 line stanza, Soul ends the first line and it also ends the last line of that stanza. But it moves from the slant or the non rhyme position, the 1 and 3 to the full rhyme position or the 2 and 4 by the end of 12. So at first it's not rhyming with anything. And then at the end of that 12 line stanza it's in the position to rhyme. So it receives the rhyme. So cool and soul. So it's something happens over the course of that. And then of course there's this famous, you know, maybe like the best rhyme ever in Dickinson is the final couplet, paws and still, which is a. We have P, A, W, S. But of course, we could say that it's a. It's a homonym for P, A, U, S, E. And therefore it rhymes sensically with stillness still. Yeah. So some really cool, strange, subversive sonnety things going on here. But yeah. He fumbles at your soul. Who is this? Who is it, Wes? 3:09 Wes: God playing us. That's my read on the stanza. 3:14 Erin: Yeah, that's my best guess too. 3:18 Wes: He, he, the big he. He sounds kind of pervy in this. 3:23 Erin: He's a John Donne kind of God. I think John Donne wishes that he had a God like this. 3:32 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting, right? So God should not be fumbling, whether it's in football or the piano or with our souls. 3:43 Erin: He should know how to unhook a 3:44 Wes: bra in one movie, Right, Exactly. He was a jock in high school, but he was also valedictorian. But anyway, yeah, so really fascinating right from the get go. So again, I think, yeah, we have to think about this in terms of divine influence or maybe Providence. Right. What God, I don't want to say predestines us to do, do, but whatever influence is there from the divine. And yeah, we're not even the performance. We're just him diddling around on the piano before he gets serious. Is that what's going on? 4:29 Erin: I think so, yeah. The fumbles implies an ineptitude, obviously. But then it seems like he's just toying with us actually, because he's in control. He's quite gifted. 4:42 Wes: Yeah. It looks like ineptitude on first blush. But then we find out that he's the brooding genius who's just dicking around before he becomes. Transforms himself into a virtuoso. 4:55 Erin: The wordplay in this is really, really stunning. Your wordplay. But he fumbles at your soul. Yeah. I like this idea. Idea that the soul is the most intimate part of your body. Right. It's the inside. There's something of greatest intimacy about the soul. Yeah. So as players at the keys before they drop full music on. Yeah. So the fumbling seems. There's something inept and then suddenly it's like, oh, maybe this is actually just. What is it? A few arpeggios. He's noodling around, then he's gonna start. So it's actually something. The fumbling is actually something like literal and figurative in terms of the meaning of this word foreplay. But it's a slow process. He stuns you by degrees. So there's this mixture, the stunning and the imagery in this, I think are marrying positive and negative Valences, as usual in Dickinson. We're stunned because we're so amazed by his talent. Or we're being clubbed over the head or something like that. We're being. We're, you know, losing. Almost losing consciousness. 6:06 Wes: Exactly. So we're stunned in the sense that we're impressed. We're duly impressed. God. But also it sounds a bit sinister because he's luring us into complacence. Right. So his whole reason for not going right into the performance is to sort of boil the frog, let's say. And we're being our brittle nature getting into the second stanza. Or substance. Is it nature in your version? Or substance? There's different versions, obviously, of these poems. Yeah. Because people altered them at first. Okay. Yeah. So our brittle natures. Our natures are too brittle to be played, so to speak, to be hammered at, like a piano key. Right off they would shatter. So we need to be molested a little bit. Sorry. We need to be fumbled around with a little bit warmed up, I guess. Foreplay. You already got that metaphor. We need to be warmed up before he really hits us with his best shot, so to speak. I love that song. Hit me with your best shot. 7:14 Erin: That was written by Dickens. I was adapted from Dickinson poem right after her hit single, no pain, no gain. But the genius. I mean, so many genius things about this poem, but one of the most genius things is the fact that the hammers inside the piano, because, of course, it's a percussive instrument. Right. So the little hammers inside the piano actually then become the hammer of the blacksmith. The first thing I thought of was Hephaestus. Yeah, yeah. The blacksmith. So the piano keys. Right. So he goes from being a pianist to a blacksmith. One needs to be literally heated up to be manipulated by the blacksmith to be hammered, or else we will break. So you have to be heated to a certain temperature determined by the color of the metal in the forge. Yeah. So we could say that the volta occurs just before the final couplet. But like most Shakespearean sonnets, there are a couple of voltas. So we could argue that this. This first one happens in this subtle way with the change in the imagery or the adjustment. The ethereal blow is something that I didn't put much pressure on in my research reading, but now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking. I'm thinking I should have. Do you have a reading for ethereal? Suddenly interested in this word? 8:44 Wes: I'm thinking of my struggle now to use a different word than intangible. But Actually, ineffable was the word that I was saying. 8:51 Erin: Ineffable. Okay, okay. 8:54 Wes: But that's my fancier word for intangible. Yeah. Why an ethereal blow? Except that he's goth and he's ethereal. And we're getting a contrast here between this very concrete image of him creating us by working with the products of the earth. Right. With metals. So it's an ethereal blow by fainter hammers. And I suppose this is just because we're being pointed to the fact that this is a spiritual process. 9:20 Erin: Yeah, she's trying to make it more palatable for the censors or something like, this is ethereal, I swear. Yeah. I'm thinking of the air, ethereal. So this is related maybe to the slant of light, too, right? From the ether. So it's the blow that, like the slant of light, seems to make a rather violent entrance. And yet it's not actually a physical violation, though, much like the heft of the cathedral tunes. This is related to sound, of course. And so actually, the blow. I think we talked about this with the bell and the head, too, Right. Like, there's the hammer. Something having to do with the functioning of the ear here. And if it's a sound, we could say that there is. In fact, even if it is ethereal, if it's a sound wave, it's still having an actual physical impact on our bodies, on our physicality in some way. I didn't think of this until now. Now, but the eardrum. Something about the drum and the right banging on the drum, and then it 10:23 Wes: gets closer and closer and it starts slowing down, which is very ominous. And now it sounds like what's happening to us is not that we're being created, but that we're. That this is about dying, right? 10:35 Erin: Oh, is that what you think? 10:36 Wes: Well, your breath has time to straighten, your. Your brain to bubble. Cool. Deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul so that the thing that we're being prepared for is death. 10:48 Erin: Hmm. 10:48 Wes: Yeah. How are you. How are you reading this? 10:51 Erin: Some kind of encounter. 10:53 Wes: Oh, okay. Okay. 10:54 Erin: It could be the poem itself, too. I mean, that scalps your naked soul. Of course, to the famous. You know, one of the things, along with hope is the thing with feathers. And various other Dickinson quotes that are famous are about poetry taking the top of one's head off. So you could almost read this as an encounter with the muse. Divine inspiration. When it comes to poetic inspiration. No. I thought of a few possibilities. 11:16 Wes: I think this is the best reading, the one you give Me, like just an encounter with God. 11:20 Erin: Yeah, an encounter, yeah, yeah. 11:22 Wes: So it could be. I mean, in the beginning it sounds as if we're talking about creation. Right. Him hammering us into existence. And then it also sounded a bit to me like the moment of death, 11:33 Erin: so Hammering us out of existence. 11:35 Wes: Well, yeah, that's why thought it was very weird. But this is much more sensible just to think of it in terms of an encounter with divine. So you might, you know, you could even read it as a. Yeah, well, moment of inspiration or. Faith is not the right word, but a moment where one is. Has an encounter with the divine. 11:54 Erin: I saw the primary tension, I think where you're seeing either creation or death. I saw as either an encounter, in a less fraught sense, a sexual encounter or a rape. Either one of these. Right. And I think that whether or not this is a rape for me is what is most complicated for me here because it seems the participation of the speaker and the agency of the speaker seems non existent. My favorite reading in the reading that I actually think is primary is the. This muse or poetry itself or whatever, like coming in and kind of, you know, invading us. But the, like the level of violence here and the. It could be, you know, I think all these readings are correct. That's always the case, you know, that's always the message. It seems for us with Dickinson is that it's all correct. Right. The complication for me, the interest is the violence and whether or not it is a rape. I mean, that scalps your naked soul seems pretty. I mean, I don't know. 12:55 Wes: Batter my heart, three-personed God. 12:57 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Right. I mean, that could be. On the one hand, I mean, it's kind of a. Am I wrong in thinking that's a very erotic line? Obviously rape and erotic are at opposite ends of the spectrum. 13:08 Wes: Yeah. So that's why you have me thinking now of the John Donne poem, this comparison of him wanting to have God's force kind of usurp him in order to instill belief in him. 13:24 Erin: Right, yes. And make it so that he doesn't really have to go through the slow process of transforming himself through conquering his passions. He's saying, God, just, you know, have your way with me and violently make me do what you want me to do. Because he himself is too weak to make himself do this. You know, he has no. He doesn't have enough self control. And so the desire for God to come in and take that control is about probably his. I think we got at this in our episode on this probably his sexual sin is the thing that he doesn't have any control over. 14:03 Wes: So he's asking, except you enthrall me. Never shall be free, nor ever chaste. Except you ravish me. Yeah, yeah. 14:11 Erin: So it's the whole waging war for peace kind of idea. A few other things that interest me here. Your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool. So she drops the word before. Right. Then so slow we would then expect before your breath has time to straighten. But this is even before the word before. And I get the brain bubbling cool. Right. Because we've had this idea that there needs to be. So we've transitioned into the blacksmith metaphor. And so this is where, before she can even cool from the heat of the forge, he then deals the final blow. But I wonder about breath having time to straighten. I'm having more difficulty locating that. And I wonder if that has to do. That goes back to the piano metaphor somehow. Something about the rhythm of the music, the complexity of the playing, the time signature of the piano music as affecting the breath in some way. But I can't quite make those line up. I was wondering if you had a reading of that. 15:13 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. Your breath is time to straighten. You're reading the word before into this. Right. That's the missing word. So it sounds like one is breathing heavily and one's brain is hot or frantic. There's anxiety, there's fear. And before you even have time to calm down, this thunderbolt scalps your naked soul. Right. And the soul is naked. There's nothing to scalp off the soul. The soul's naked. There's no hair or scalp there to be taken off. What question were you asking about the straightening the breath Straightening? I don't make it anything else of it other than that. But yeah. 15:53 Erin: Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a musical parallel there that was. 15:56 Wes: Oh, I see. 15:57 Erin: Has time to straighten. The fumbling and then the dropping. Full music on. I'm wondering about time signature. 16:04 Wes: Yeah. One can imagine the breathing. The breathing is irregular. 16:08 Erin: Mm. Yes. Yeah. And I wondered if that was simply a connection back to the music. Yeah. Because we have the further nearer then so slow. Oh, and I also just wanted to say another little cool Easter egg in the poem is prepares your brittle nature for the ethereal blow by fainter hammers further heard. So the one in three in each one of these quatrains is a non rhyming position, except for here, nature further heard, which is a sort of slant R. And it's nature heard further Off. Right. So there's something. There's something going on there with the music of the poem where it actually, like, picks up. It echoes. So something quite cool going on there. Yeah. So anyway, so. So mentally flummoxed, overheated, and quite vulnerable, too, in your breath and your brain, and then deals one imperial thunderbolt that scares scalps your naked soul. I think, of course, of the slant of light. Again, the imperial affliction. This is a lot more personal than affliction, which is sort of unlocatable. It's oddly depersonalized or uncorporeal kind of way of phrasing. The hurt, the heavenly hurt. This is far more. But then again, it's about soul. So there's something also, like, incorporeal about this last line as well. But it feels super violent and personal and. Yeah. And intimate. If we're thinking of the idea of fumbling at the soul as being fumbling at the innermost part of us. 17:37 Wes: I'm looking at this in terms of the reading where this is about creation. Now, I had thought that this sounded like death because of the scalp, I guess, the moment of scalping and the breath and the brain. But, yeah, here you can imagine us on the. On the forge, or where would we be resting if we're little figurines being made by Vulcan. Right. So we've come out of the forge and. Right. We're cooling down and apparently we're already breathing, but our breathing is not yet ordered. And then God has got to zap life into us. Right. Normally, Zeus, if it's Zeus, right. It's a thunderbolt to punish you and kill you, but in this case, it's like Frankenstein. He's got to use electricity to bring us to life. 18:25 Erin: Oh, that's cool. 18:26 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So Vulcan did his part, and now it is. Vulcan and Hephaestus are the same. Right. This image of the. The instilling of electricity into us, of. Of life on this reading is complicated by this idea that this is a scalping. Or maybe this is to say that by instilling a soul in us, God gives us something that's unprotected. Right. It's not simply located in the cranium. It's not a physical thing surrounded by a skull, but in a way, it's infinitely vulnerable, especially to God himself. It's completely naked. So that the very giving of a soul just is a scalping because it's giving us this thing that is uncovered and has no boundary around it. 19:14 Erin: I like that. So at first, though, there Is obviously there's a violence inherent to the imagery. From the very beginning. There's a studied quality because we have this. I'm imagining this concert pianist, you know, who's stunning us with his talent. And eventually by the end of the first stanza, we get this more primal, violent, just instinctual type of action. Maybe there's something that kind of goes from most to least studied over the course of the stanza. Because we could say that the concert pianist is an artist. Then we could say that the blacksmith is like an artisan. And then we have the idea of the primal, of just the violent impulse that is not in any way reflected upon, mediated by some kind of study or some, you know, it's just an urge. It's just a. Because then in the final couple, we just get the winds, you know, the forces of nature themselves, which are unconnected from any kind of, like, personification. So it seems that there's some sort of, you know, we're going down in an elevator here somehow into. Into nature itself. 20:25 Wes: Yeah. Our artistry has become something violent, something purely savage violent. 20:32 Erin: Yeah. 20:32 Wes: Right. When we go from the hammering to the scalping, it's interesting because in the version edited by Mabel Loom, Loomis Todd and then the other person, Higginson, right. They. They changed scalps to peels. P, E, L, S. Which I guess is a bit, you know, and maybe there's meant to be double meaning, like the peeling of a bell or something. 20:59 Erin: Oh, yeah. 21:00 Wes: But also it's a bit. It's a bit of a softer image. Right. Instead of scalping, instead of this violent act, it's like, oh, here's an orange. I'm going to peel it. 21:11 Erin: Well, yeah, I mean, it's a different form of savagery. I think of someone's skin being flayed off. 21:20 Wes: Right. There's something much more casual about just peeling a person into existence. 21:25 Erin: Yeah. This is the. I'm thinking of that gross, gross scene I could never watch in Lord of the Rings where they're cutting the orcs out of the wombs. You know, those, like, disgusting. 21:39 Wes: I don't even remember that. Oh, you mean in Mordor. Right. So that's. Yeah. 21:43 Erin: Where they're being burst or Isengard. Whichever. All the. Gosh, my sister's going to come after me for not knowing. For not knowing which one. I think it's an Isengard because Saruman is overseeing it. 21:55 Wes: Oh, right, yeah. Okay. The. 21:58 Erin: He's birthing more soldiers for his army, but, yeah, they're being peeled out of that womb type structure. And obviously gross. That's something that's going on here, too. We're peeled out of the womb. I don't know. My mom had a C section After 23 hours of labor, as she loves to tell me, so. C sections. Maybe there's more peeling than a vaginal birth. Depends. 22:25 Wes: Yeah. 22:27 Erin: Now it's getting really. 22:28 Wes: All right. Is any other gross association we could make? 22:31 Erin: Wes is turning pale. I'm just kidding. 22:36 Wes: I'd rather be scalped into existence than. 22:40 Erin: Than birthed into existence. 22:41 Wes: Than naturally birthed. 22:43 Erin: Than naturally birthed, yeah. Oh, come on. 22:48 Wes: But getting away from vaginas, 22:53 Erin: you can't. You can't get away. 22:57 Wes: What is this completely left turn that she makes into. What is this? I mean, what does this couplet have to do with anything? 23:06 Erin: I was hoping you were going to tell me. Yeah. When winds take forests in their paws, the universe is still. We're suddenly cutting in a cinematic way. We cut to am an image of a forest from above. You know, a drone is taking this footage. And I'm envisioning a cloudy day because I'm thinking of cloudy, cloudy paws. The winds or something. Yeah. And so it leaves us with this. What just seems like a total non sequitur image. Why do we cut to this? Well, first of all, cloudy pause. Again, there are no clouds in here, but pause. It's like. It's something rounded. I'm thinking of. And since prior to this, maybe the importance of hands, it's invisible because there's no use of the word hands in the first part of the poem. It's just fumbles and then players at the keys. So hands are implied. But maybe with concert pianists, it's like white gloved hand hands, you know? And so now that's what I think of when I think of the paws. Like there's something kind of blunted. 24:17 Wes: Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense. Paws are good for fumbling. 24:20 Erin: Right? Right. Keep your paws off me. Yeah. 24:23 Wes: I'm thinking of. Have you read the Confederacy of Dunces? 24:27 Erin: Yeah, a long, long time ago. 24:29 Wes: The book ends with this scene where Ignatius O'Reilly kind of paws at one of the pigtails of his romantic interest. I guess that's like. And that always. For some reason, that image always stuck with me. His hands are compared to paws. I couldn't tell you. I've forgotten most of the book, but for some reason, that particular scene really stuck with me. Does God have paws at this point? Has God been transformed into kind of some sort of sylvan type of deity? Right. Something appropriate to the Forest and an animal. Something more rustic and natural at this point. 25:08 Erin: Well, maybe I'm also thinking of the image of Jupiter and IO. Again, if we're thinking of. We've already made this connection with the thunderbolt to Zeus, and Zeus as creator. But also, of course, if we're talking about rape here, he's also serial rapist. And pawing, as I think we've already hinted at, there's the frequent association with keep your paws off me, a guy pawing a woman. There's something of. Yeah. Violation and also a little bit of fumbling of. Of. Of. Of sexual ineptitude. You know, they're. They're like making a pass, but it's a. It's a bad one. It implies a lack of sophistication or something to be pawed at. 25:49 Wes: Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape. 25:52 Erin: Aha. 25:53 Wes: To get at that quote. 25:55 Erin: There we go. Yeah, no, but the. I'm just thinking of the Correggio painting of Jupiter embracing IO with those cloudy paws. You know, they look like paws. And that's a moment of rape where she's enveloped by the cloud. So sort of uniting all of that in the same way that, I guess, Zeus unites this creator, destroyer, seducer, rapist, whatever. All of these. All these epithets we could apply to him. Yeah. I don't know if it's pawing at someone. That had to have been an idiom in Dickinson's day, in any case. 26:31 Wes: Yeah. The God in this poem does sound quite pagan, you know. Right. With references to Vulcan and Zeus. Yeah. And now some sort of. Yeah. Are we still talking about Jupiter here or. I mean, I like your. This idea of the Correggio painting, but. 26:48 Erin: Yeah. And the forest. Like the forest nymphs. 26:51 Wes: So. Yeah. Some sort of natural force. But we've been talking about the relationship between God or Zeus and. And we created ones. Whether it's the moment of creation or whether it's some moment of contact with God, maybe even rebirth, you know, within. Within life. And now the image that seems to replace that is. It's as if we've been born and it's the winds of the midwife. Maybe they're holding the newborn in their paws. We've been delivered up and now we're being held. And then the universe stands still in awe of this created scalped baby. 27:35 Erin: Yeah, but the baby is also being. We're also shaking the baby. I mean, this is the strange thing, because if the winds are taking. We have to think through that. Because if the winds are taking yes, right. It's the winds themselves. 27:54 Wes: The forest, by the way, being a stand in for us. Right. With trees representing humanity, so the created ones. And so we get a collective. An image of collective birth and being held. But yeah, so we're onto shaken baby syndrome. 28:11 Erin: There's a paradox when the. 28:13 Wes: Yes, yeah. 28:14 Erin: Between the forest and the universe. Because there's. If the winds are shaking the trees, then somehow the universe is still. That seems to be it. Or are they just not moving? Are they about to shake the trees? This is the right. 28:26 Wes: Right, yeah, no, this is good. I'm glad you pointed this out because. Yeah, we would think that the baby upon birth would be held and contained and that holding and containment happens at a psychological level as well. It's not just a physical thing. It's evocative of care. Right. What's being evoked here is the concept of care. But winds, as you're pointing out, blow. They don't hold normally. They are disorganizing instead of containing. And then the thing that is seems to get contained or held is the universe, or actually held is the universe as a whole. That's the thing that is made still by all this. Yeah, that. That's. That's really interesting. So that. In other words, just to say one more thing about that, our life on Earth, of course, is going to be full of turmoil and tumult. It's not going to be peaceable. 29:17 Erin: That's just not if you have anything to do about it. Oh, okay. 29:22 Wes: It's a lot of scalping, hammering. But one might treat this as theodicy. Right. So that for all the blowing of our force on Earth, from a grander point of view, it's all for the. We live in the best possible universe and it's all for the good. So there's some higher harmony, as Ivan would put it, in the Brothers Karamazov. Right. So the world looks evil from our perspective, or there's a lot of evil in the world from our perspective, but the universe as a whole is good and the best possible universe. So it's still in that sense. 30:00 Erin: Yeah, still. Still. Now I'm realizing how many potential meanings still can have. 30:03 Wes: Well, how were you. Yeah, remind me how you. You were reading it. 30:06 Erin: Yeah, so. So as we've already said, there are these. Universe is somehow differentiated from forest, but also wind is somehow differentiated from itself as being both the wind and the stopping of the wind. Like the image of throttling. 30:20 Wes: Yeah. I think we have to hold the contradiction there, which is that our birth into this world you know, it doesn't stop with the birth into the hands of kind midwife and swaddling. And that. That image of a newborn being held. Right. It goes beyond that and it's full of the winds of fortune blow us around, so to speak. Right. To be held on birth is for us mortals to be blown around. If we think of our whole lifespan and, you know, we would hope it would be nice if it weren't that way. And if we were just. We came out of the forge, we cool down and then someone puts us on a shelf and we're just happy forever. But instead we're animate, we're scalped, and we're subject to all this turmoil. And it's just a very clever paradoxical image. Where we're holding is not really holding unless you look at it from this other perspective. Right. Where if we stand outside of time, maybe we could see all this buzzing confusion as a stillness from that higher perspective. 31:24 Erin: Yes. I'm beginning to think of this as just. This whole poem is just a rewriting of King Lear's blow, winds speech. Doesn't he have thunderbolts in there? There's a bunch of things in there that are the same, Right? Blow, winds, crack your cheeks. 31:41 Wes: He probably asks to be hit by one. 31:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, that. You know, when I went to that recital last night, it really moved me a bunch of other things. But also the naked soul. Right. The forked, bare, forked creature. 31:57 Wes: Oh, unaccommodated men. 31:59 Erin: Yeah. 32:00 Wes: Unclothed, uncovered up by the false pretense of culture. And so blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage. Blow. You cataracts and hurricanos, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks, you sulfurous and thought executing fires. Okay, so I think that's where we get the lightning. Right. Vaunt couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts. All right. Forests, singe my white head. He does. He does ask to be led by light. Okay, I knew it. All right. And thou all shaking thunder, smite flat the thick rotundity of the world. Crack nature, nature's molds all. Oh, crack nature's molds. Speaking of a forge, all germens spill at once. That make ingrateful man. 32:52 Erin: Yeah, and that's dirty too. 32:54 Wes: Wow. All germens spill at once. Wow. What is Shakespeare saying with them? Let's just talk about Shakespeare for a second. 33:01 Erin: Well, first of all, I can't believe I was right, that I. That this is just a re. Like. Yeah. The more I thought about it, the more I was like, wait a minute, there's thunderbolts in there. But, like, I didn't remember anything in particular from that speech except for those, like, couple of images. But everything is in there. The trees. 33:16 Wes: Wow. Singe. My white head is very reminiscent of scalping. Wow. This is really cool, but man Shakespeare, Man Dickinson. He's got it all. He's got it all. They both got it all. 33:28 Erin: Yeah. 33:29 Wes: All right, so are we gonna. Shall we wind down? 33:32 Erin: Sorry. Oh, you truly have the Dickinsonian mind going on there. 33:39 Wes: Exactly. 33:40 Erin: All wins all wines. 33:44 Wes: That's right. That's right. 33:45 Erin: That's good. Okay, thank you. 33:48 Wes: Thank you, 33:51 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine. Upcoming Episodes: “Rosemary’s Baby,” Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”). Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part three of our four part discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In parts one and two, we discussed I felt a funeral in my brain, and after great pain a formal feeling comes respectively. And today we're doing number 320. There's a certain slant of light. All right, I'll read it. Let's dive right in. There's a certain slant of light Winter afternoons that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes Heavenly hurt it gives us we can find no scar, but internal difference where the meanings are. None may teach it any. Tis the seal despair, an imperial affliction sent us of the air when it comes, the landscape listens. Shadows hold their breath when it goes. Tis like the distance on the look of death. Well, none may teach it any sort of. So I guess we'll never really know what this is, but I'm feeling like this is the wrong poem to be covering today because it is March 25th. In Salt Lake City. We had a snowstorm last week. Today it is 72 degrees and sunny and gorgeous. 1:50 Wes: Oh, wow. 1:51 Erin: So I'm going to have to activate my mind of winter to bring in another poet to try and get in the mood for this here. But I do think this is describing a very specific New England phenomenon here. This particular slant of light or maybe, maybe the whole northeast. I don't know. I don't want to. I don't want to limit it geographically, but I do think in the north, that particular slant of light that she's talking about on those days where it's so too cold to snow. Right. That expression. I don't know if you're familiar with this. 2:22 Wes: It's not happening in Cancun. 2:24 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. 2:26 Wes: So, yeah, so the sun is. It's winter. So the sun is lower in the sky and obviously not up for as long. And it's that, you know. I know, exactly. It's hard to describe, but it's, you know, you kind of know exactly what she's talking about. It's that quality of winter light in Boston, you know, it's the slant of light that goes straight into your eye. 2:46 Erin: Yes. 2:46 Wes: When you're walking down the street in winter, it's just like the glare because the sun is so low in the sky. 2:51 Erin: This is exactly I think what I wrote in here, what I want to talk about, the idea that it is blinding because of that particular angle. We don't get it here in Salt Lake. It's. You know, this is really. Despite the copious amounts of snow in the winter, this is still high desert. So we get a really nice, much fuller sunshine. So I do think it's peculiar to the Northeast in the US Maybe other places in the world, but I don't know. And maybe like the Great Plains. 3:20 Wes: I bought polarized sunglasses just because of that. Like driving south in Boston because the. The sun is arcing in the southern sky and low in the sky. It's brutal. 3:31 Erin: It is. 3:32 Wes: She doesn't mention the sunglasses, but that might help. 3:36 Erin: That's 321. There's a certain slant of light for which I bought polarized lenses. That sounds like a beginning of a. 3:44 Wes: Off of zenny.com. yeah, she's frugal. I sort of think of the slant of the shaft of light that comes into a room as well, that you sort of see in the dust. Right. As it slants in through a window. That's the other association I make. So it's interesting because light should be warm, obviously, but it's almost like a icicle or something winterly that the light is doing. 4:11 Erin: I'm thinking of quartz contentment that we talked about last time. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. That's the peculiar thing. I think about this light on days when it's cloudy in winter in New England, it's usually not as cold as those days where it's clear and there is sunshine. But it's that kind of incredibly. I don't know, maybe the clouds are insulating the. The landscape or something. At least they are in my imagination. And when it's clear and the light comes in, it really is. It's like this beam of freezing cold. It's very strange. But I like what you point out about being blinded, because this is exactly what I thought of and I thought the light that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes. I'm thinking of something that obliterates the self. We're blinded, so we kind of can't see. And in that same way the cathedral tunes A cathedral in Salt Lake. I don't know why I'm bringing back so many things to personal experience. I'm sorry to the listeners, but we have this really big, famous organ in the cathedral and we have very frequent organ recitals at my parish here. And when it's playing really, really loudly, it's this transcendent experience where you feel. Yeah. You can't move or think. It's just crowding everything else out. So that connection that she makes to me is really, really true and related to this idea that it is at that angle that blinds you and makes it so that you can. We can't really function outside. 5:39 Wes: Right. So she gives us a nice paradoxical image of light not only weighing something, but having a heft. A heft that's oppressive, that weighs down on us. Right. So light should be warm, but it's cold, in a sense. Even though she doesn't say that it should be. Light should be. Light should not be heavy. But it's. But it's heavy. And then we get the association to. Or the comparison to cathedral tunes. So now we're on a spiritual jag, maybe. No religious jag. And it. You know, one might think that light as something intangible and something associated with the divine. Right. And there have been various associations with the divine, is something that might uplift you and warm you and put you in touch with the divine. But here it's a. It's oppressive. We're getting a bit of a critique, it sounds like, of religion as well. 6:32 Erin: Yeah. Both the tunes and the light are sent us of the air. 6:37 Wes: Right. 6:37 Erin: As she says in the third stanza. So there's this strange heft, this strange weight, which she's associating with the Light and the Cathedral tunes, which I think is related to what she would describe as this oppression of religion, this faith being this thing that has no. By definition, it has no real substance. You have to believe in something that you can't see. In this instance, there are sound waves and there are. It's visible. So it's more than. I guess, more than faith. But it's. Yeah. As the representatives or the ways in which faith is typically portrayed in, say, painting of a beam of light coming and hitting, you know, the head of a saint or something like that, is what I think of. It's described as oppressive. What's maybe interesting or slightly more complicated about that is the fact that. That Dickinson so often writes in common meter. And common meter is the meter of pretty much any hymn. Most of the religious tunes that you would hear in a church at that time would be in common meter. And so she is herself writing in the tune that you would hear in a cathedral. It changes. We get the typical 4, 3, 4, 3 stanza in the first and fourth stanzas, but the middle two, they're shorter, they're a little truncated. So we Get a three, three in the middle. But I wonder about that. I wonder if this is a bit of a self critique as well, or a slight wink to us. 8:03 Wes: Interesting. So a heavenly hurt. Yeah. What is that about? 8:07 Erin: Yeah, I read this as being. I don't know if there's another way to read this. The stigmata. I'm thinking about the stigmata for people that don't know. I feel like probably everybody does. But the wounds of Christ, particularly on his hands, the nail wounds, and sometimes on the feet, and sometimes in the form of wounds that the crown of thorns might have created on the, on the scalp or in the forehead, have sometimes appeared on people. Several saints in the Catholic Church received the stigmata. But receiving the stigmata does not itself guarantee any kind of canonization. And in fact there have been instances of this that have been faked and things like that. So the church is actually quite wary of it, I think. But Saint Faustina, Saint Catherine of Siena, famously Saint Francis, you could see in the Giotto frescoes his stigmata. And in the 20th century, someone like Padre Pio received the stigmata. And that's associated usually with ecstasy and with this idea of truly joining with the suffering of Christ. So the evident, sometimes actually they get. I've heard of invisible stigmatas in the past, but for the most part they are evident. And the scar, if you will, is right there. Sometimes it bleeds actively, sometimes it doesn't. I know in certain miraculous occasions, I mean, it is itself. If it's legitimate, of course, according to the church, then the church sees it as a miracle. But sometimes it smells sweetly, sometimes it'll smell of flowers, but yeah, a visible sign that these pious people are really participating in a very literal and active way in the suffering of Christ's passion. This is sort of an inside out stigmata, it seems to me. It's interior, so we could find no evidence of it on the outside, but it creates an internal difference. And rather than increasing faith or having a redemptive function, this just brings despair. So it's almost a satanic stigmata, if you like, and natural and related to New England winters. 10:17 Wes: So, yeah, so light comes in, bypasses the polarized sunglasses, penetrates us, I guess. It doesn't have to be the eyes that it penetrates. And of course the stigmata points us to the hands. But anyway, so it penetrates us, but it doesn't leave a scar. And I suppose a scar would be an indication of atonement in a way, a sign of atonement. What do stigmata represent? Christ's sacrifice his atonement for our sins. It's the aftermath, of course, of an act of suffering. But, yeah. Do you have anything more to say about that? 10:55 Erin: So this is related to the idea in Catholicism that suffering is actually transformative and that you can also offer your suffering up because everyone is part of the body of Christ. You could actually offer your suffering up for someone else to help alleviate their suffering. So you don't have to have a stigmata to do this. The idea is, I don't know, if you're Wes and you're recording a podcast with Erin, and you could say, oh, God, this is gonna be such suffering. I'm gonna offer this up today for the sake of, you know, the soul's in purgatory or for the sake of my friend who is going through a hard time or something like that, because this is, you know, true suffering. So. And the idea is that this can be. This could be redemptive in this way. It also can purify you, the suffering, if you. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the. It's not just supposed to be like, oh, I'm like a Pharisee, you know, publicly performing a lot of, you know, the point isn't that you're wearing the hair shirt and going around going, oh, my God, I have this, you know, this stigmata. In fact, most people, you know, they have. They cover it up. They. They don't display it so that everybody knows how sort of pious they are. Right. Yeah. So it's not so much about this visibility per se, though it is also usually visible in this really obvious way. Padre Pio wore gloves to try and cover it, but you can see it in certain pictures because it was actively bleeding. So sometimes you see bandages on his hands with. Yeah, like. Like a bleeding through that he had to keep changing. 12:25 Wes: So normally I. I suppose. Here's the way I think about it. Leaving aside the divine, we feel the sting of conscience. We do something wrong or sinful, you might call it, and if we are hurt by that, then it, you know, it could be the sting of conscience. It could be sanctioned from the community. And then I suppose if there's atonement, right, it might lead to some kind of change. Ideally, the herd is going to lead to some sort of change. As you. I think you pointed out in the case of the divine and Christ in particular, the wrongs are too great. We can't atone for them on our own. Christ has to do it for us. And I suppose so the weight of guilt is too heavy or human nature is such that there's no full atonement to be made. I'm not sure. But, yeah, I guess I'm trying to puzzle out this idea that the normal narratives. We do bad things and then heaven helps us out. 13:19 Erin: Yes. 13:20 Wes: Alleviates some of our guilt, but in this case, heaven is hurting us. And so I'm trying to figure out what that means. And so the slant of light might be like the slant of conscience, the light that exposes the thing that we've done and then hurts us. And if we can't find a scar, it sounds like we're not finding any permanent change that might come from atonement until we get to the next two lines, which are a bit cryptic. Right. We get internal difference where the meanings are, which I'm sure postmodernists and post structuralists have loved these two lines and made lots of them. Right. The post structuralist idea that meaning just is difference. So, yeah, we can get into what internal differences. So if there's any redemption here, it's in this internal difference where the meanings are. But, yeah. Do you see what I'm saying? 14:14 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And this is why I think I immediately go to the stigmata. Because what she does is locates God or the heavens as the origin of both good and evil here and. And the heavenly hurt. So the stigmata is something that it's typically. I think. I'm sorry, but like, real theologians who are gonna be listening to this, I'm probably getting some of this stuff wrong, but I believe that it has to be asked for on the part of the stigmata bearer. It's not usually given. You know, it's this really crazy niche form of suffering. 14:51 Wes: Right. 14:51 Erin: And I also hesitate to. I mean, she's obviously referencing the stigmata here, but she's also not a Catholic. How this would line up with the faith tradition in which she was steeped as a child is unclear to me. Of course she would know about the stigmata. But the idea is just what is maybe a bit sacrilegious or a critique about this is she's saying that these things come from God that locates evil and good with God in a way that is not applicable to the stigmata, where she's using this image to make a larger point about the fact that God is this, at best, this vengeful God who gives us these afflictions to test us or to purify us or whatever you want to say. And at worst, he's both God and the Devil. 15:38 Wes: Right. 15:39 Erin: Like torturing us. And I mean, there isn't even an alternative here. There isn't anything good. I don't think that comes. That comes from God in this poem, because it's just about this land of light. 15:48 Wes: Yeah. So one might accuse religion of. Of making us guilty, as Nietzsche would put it, giving us bad conscience. That religion inflicts that on us and inflicts a certain kind of pathological value system on us. A certain version of morality that's not good for us, which would again, line up the slant of light with the sting of conscience. But if we think we need a conscience, which I think we do. So one can read this as saying, well, well, heaven is this origin of the norms that have normative authority that will lead us to have something to feel guilty about if we violate those norms. It could be something very straightforward like that. Or it could be this critique where. In other words, one could give a reading of this where it's neutral to the role of religion and it just describes something almost metaphysical or structural. It needs to happen if there are to be norms and how guilt is related to norms and things like that and involves some relation to the divine. Or one might read this and say, okay, this is a critique of religion as inducing in us bad conscience. I mean, the upside here is what do we make of internal difference where the meanings are. Internal difference does. Well, it could suggest that it just produces internal conflict, and maybe that's guilt. But one might also think of internal difference as kind of the dialectical driver of change. And then where the meanings are. Seems to be positive. 17:21 Erin: That's true. I didn't think about the positive valence of this. I mean, I suppose any injury which then results in a scar would be, on the one hand, negative because of the fact that there's been an injury that's harmed our wholeness in some way. On the other hand, scar is indicative of something that was survived and also of something that's been healed. 17:46 Wes: Right. 17:46 Erin: It's not an open wound. I didn't think about this because I just think about her critique of religion. Really? 17:51 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think we. So we find no scar because it's not. It's on the inside. It's spiritual rather than physical light. Right. The light goes right into us. But then the other part of this is scar tissue is sort of. Of static and it's grown over. Right. And it's still somewhat painful. Whereas internal difference, where the meanings are, sounds a little bit more dynamic and alive. Whether or not we give this a You know, a darker reading or a lighter. 18:22 Erin: Sure. 18:22 Wes: You know, I don't know whether to interpret this as positive or negative or both, but. Right, yeah. Internal difference could just be guilt and internal conflict. And then in that case, where the meanings are. Well, yeah. What do we make of them? Here's one way to think about it. It's just that we think about it psychologically. So again, going to Nietzsche here, conscience just is the thing, the reason why we can't get rid of it. It is just the thing that gives us a soul, or this is the thing that gives us a psyche because it carves out that terrain. If we simply discharge all of our instincts, our impulses, and do violent or sexual things or whatever, discharge it into the environment, then we don't. Nothing gets turned inward. And therefore the domain of the soul is not carved out of that rock. We really have to have our impulses turned back on ourselves in order to produce not just conscience but consciousness, humanness. So to be human as we know it would require this sort of dynamic of conscience, which would explain why that's the place where the meanings are. So one reading of this is just that this is what's required to even have a soul, this sort of relationship to the divine. And even Nietzsche acknowledges this. It's not like we can go back and say, oh, we're going to get rid of conscience. We can't do that. 19:42 Erin: I was thinking of this in terms of the fact that she seems to be investing this light with this meaning. Right. She's projecting something onto the landscape which she's sort of saying isn't really there. Right. If we're interpreting this light as, say, a divine messenger, she's sort of at the same time toying with this idea and saying, well, it's only we who invest that light with that kind of metaphoric significance, and therefore the only meaning is within us, really. I don't know if that's related somehow ultimately to this idea of conscience and the idea that we're simply interpreting. I mean, this is nature versus maybe like conscience more involves or more regularly involves things we do to other people who themselves have their own inner meanings. But, yeah, something about how it's only in the self is the reality or the subjectivity which is then cast on the landscape and interpreting, so projected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 20:40 Wes: If one were an error theorist or nihilist about morality and there are no objectives, external moral norms, then that would be what one might say. Right. Is that the idea? There's a nihilistic possibility here. So we Create these meanings and we create normative meanings, but it doesn't map on anything. 21:00 Erin: Right. Well, in this word projection, you know, one sees the light kind of from within us going outwards. You know, it seems like actually the inverse of the slant of light coming in into us. You know, we're the ones who are casting the light of meaning onto the landscape. 21:14 Wes: Yeah. So we fantasize the divine and if we're giving it a religious reading, we can give it a lot of different readings. A religious reading. I think of the light as like a laser that penetrates us. And I was associating it to the sting of conscience. And that's, you know, it's a very specific way of looking at this. There are other ways, I think, but. And yet you could see that as the divine being the source of the normative on one level. But then she might be challenging that very notion, as you point out. And you reverse that and you say, well, the divine is our invention and we do this to ourselves and it's just a way of giving ourselves a metaphysical source for the guilt, Creating the problem and then solving it in the same stroke. This is again another Nietzsche. Right. We create the problem of guilt and then with the divine and then. And use the divine also to solve that problem. 22:06 Erin: Ah, how clever of us. 22:10 Wes: And I think, yeah, you know, conscience. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but concepts of empathy are very. We're doing this on the Partially Examined Life right now. Empathy is a very difficult concept to understand. We have this access to other people's mental life and we can sympathize with it, commiserate or rejoice in their joy. But that doesn't mean that we are simply taking on their feelings or simulating someone else's feelings. We preserve the independence of the other. There's something essentially non egoistic about our involvement with other people. So if we care about someone, it doesn't reduce to egoism. It's not like if you're in pain and I'm concerned about that, it's me. Right. It's reducible to my pain. Oh, I'm in pain because you're in pain. And then all I'm ever reacting to is my own pain. Phenomenologists like the German philosopher Max Scheler, very convincing, who's by the way, a Christian as well. 23:06 Erin: They all became eventually all the phenomenologists. 23:09 Wes: Right. Edith Stein, she was Jewish and then Christian. Yeah. So very convincing arguments that there's this, there's something that's irreducible. The simple egoism in us, where we have access to other people's pain, suffering and pleasure, joy, and we can care about it without it being reducible to our own egoism. And the same thing with conscience, where so we don't not do bad things because we're afraid of the sting of conscience. Ooh, I'm going to feel pain afterwards. Because we wouldn't feel that sting of conscience if the norm didn't have authority in the first place. The authoritativeness of the norm cannot be reduced to psychology. Psychology follows on the authoritative norm of the norm. So if I ought not to harm someone, then the sting of conscience and the guilt that follows only follows if I comprehend that norm as authoritative. It doesn't explain the authoritativeness of the norm. It doesn't explain what's right or wrong. Anyway, I'm leading us a little bit off the beaten path here. 24:13 Erin: No, I love it. 24:13 Wes: Yeah, it's salient in the sense that it seems like the question that she might be getting at is how it is that we source the normative and whether it's coming in as a slant of light or if that's just a kind of myth, are we going to be nihilists about this? In other words, are we going to accept some non nihilistic explanation, whether that's religion or something else? 24:37 Erin: Well, does then the third stanza settle the question? Is despair the result of this? Is that something that can come from within us or is that a. You know, so we have this idea of the imperial affliction and despair seems to me to be. Well, actually maybe this does play into your point. The sacrilegious part of this is the idea that despair, or sort of turning one's back on God is a thing that can be sent from God himself. Perhaps this is a further teasing out of what you're describing, which is this idea that something about the oppression with which we incept ourselves or something, or our projection of God then causes us to turn away almost the inside out idea of the Nietzsche thing like we have the guilt and then also the way to alleviate the guilt. Here we have the God who's supposed to be the merciful God, but also the despair, the turning away from that mercy. Is that right? 25:35 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's possible. Let me just think out loud about this a little bit, uncle here. Right now, none may teach it anything. Okay, so which means it can't be changed. There's no teaching that will get us away from this hurt, this heavenly hurt. And this is true, right? We could be moral nihilists if we want to, at a theoretical level. But most people are possessed by the normative, by morality in a way that. That is involuntary. It's not going to be simply the case that they stop thinking, thinking things are right and wrong. Or let's just put it more ordinarily. Good luck getting rid of your conscience and your guilt, right? If you have that, even if you go to therapy for 100 years, it's not going to turn you into a sociopath. Hopefully you get rid of some of the excess guilt that you shouldn't, you know, that you're carrying around. But we're all, unless we're sociopaths, we're all, as socialized beings, going to have that. So none may teach it anything. Some level of guilt is ineradicable. And then that's. So that's what I take to be the imperial affliction. The divine is. What's. This is part of her reversal, right? The divine is what's responsible for guilt. The happier picture is that the divine is what can alleviate our guilt because it gets displaced onto Christ. God takes on the punishment in a way, because there's nothing that we could ever do to atonement, atone. It's too big a burden for us to atone for. We need the divine figure himself to atone for this type of burden. So, you know, we are. We're in God's image. We're quasi divine. We have the power to earn judgment, but not to atone for it. So anyways, so yeah, that's what I take the imperial affliction to be. And the seal, despair, I guess the seal is supposed to be, right. It's stamped on permanently. Despair is stamped on us permanently, despite the fact that it's sent us of the air. So again, we get this nice contrast between the light and the airy and the intangible and the very, very concrete thing that it does to us. And again, we can say the same thing of conscience as something that's product of the social right. And this is where you might think of difference again, as the difference of the other and the community of others come together, right? In a way, if one is going to be a sociologist about it, norms arise out of that. So I guess when I'm just trying to reinforce the point that there's something very intangible about the whole idea of norms, good and bad, morality, conscience, all of those things, they. They are untouchable, but at the level of human character, right, they're still intangible technically, but there's or let's just think about it in terms of our own suffering and our own inner lives. Maybe, let's put it that way. We feel them very acutely. Right. They weigh on us, they have a heft. The norms are intangible, but what they do to us are very real and concrete from our own subjective perspective. 28:43 Erin: I love all of this, but I'm really struggling to keep up because none of this occurred to me as I moved. You know, I have a very different reading of this. 28:50 Wes: Yeah, no, and I. I should say, yeah, this is me doing my very. Once I get focused on an idea, I can't stop. And then everything. I just look at it through the lens of that idea. So. 29:00 Erin: Well, no, I love it. It's far more interesting. 29:02 Wes: The listeners should take everything I say with a huge grain of salt. 29:07 Erin: It's far more interesting than what I. The reading I had, which is of the stanza, which is just the kind of within the universe of the things we were already talking about in the previous parts. So, you know, none may teach it any. This idea that the. Of the instructive connected back to. Was it he that bore in after great pain? Right. The idea that the oppressions of ritual are actually somehow anti. Instructive that it's turned in on itself. Because I think we talked about the fact that with pain there's the obliteration of the answer, the ability to take a lesson from it. So what should be instructive? The pain that should be instructive, that should unite us to Christ is actually causing the. The inverse of that is actually obliterating the consciousness in some crucial way. And then I had this really, what I thought was this really sophisticated, far out reading of this stanza, which is nowhere near as sophisticated as yours. And now I'm a little embarrassed of it. I thought, you know, the seal, I was teasing this out. The seal that brands us, the stigmata like quality of that sealing the coffin. And then, you know, I'm just free associating. And then I thought the seal sent us of the air. I was like, oh, does this have to do with mail? And I wanted to get back to, you know, I was like, oh, this is the Civil War angle. This is the Civil War reading. 30:23 Wes: Oh, I thought you were going to say like seals with like the flippers. 30:27 Erin: Yes, loose seals. Yeah, the seal. 30:31 Wes: That's right. 30:32 Erin: The seal sent us of the air is when we. 30:34 Wes: I had a pet seal named Despair. 30:37 Erin: When we play the. Oh, gosh, what is it called? The grabby game. That's the seal Sent us of the air that we get for army. Oh, for marksmanship. Anyway, an affliction sent us of the air like mail, like news of the dead and the Civil War. This is really bad. I'm sorry. 30:56 Wes: Well, is that. No, I mean, this is. 30:58 Erin: Because then you get news that somebody in your family's been killed and it's the Civil War. It's like airmail seal, the seal of the government, saying, anyway, I hate myself. Okay. 31:14 Wes: No, no, this is interesting. Well, before we get to the fourth stanza, I'll just say one more thing about Imperial Affliction. And just thinking of it psychoanalytically often our. And again, just kind of still riding this guilt horse interpretation I'm doing. When we are particularly guilty in attacking ourselves, it represents an attachment, according to Freud, to an ideal other and a perfect other. And what we do is we're in denial. We maintain our connection to the ideal by being in denial of its imperfections and flaws. And then we identify with the bad and then attack ourselves as if we were the bad. So in other words, we feel guilty because God is disappointing. What we really want to do is accuse God like Job and say, why are you making me suffer so much? But instead we just inflict more suffering on ourselves and tell ourselves that we deserve it, beat ourselves up. So for people who are depressed, for instance, there's often a kind of grandiose layer underneath the self attack. There's an attachment to an idea of self and other which are more perfect. And so one might accuse religion of being in this domain of a grandiose, perfect relationship between this perfect divine parent who has done no wrong, and me, the one who can be perfected through forgiveness from this divine figure and purified by that. But in the meantime, the way I maintain that connection is to do this very opposite thing, which is to treat myself as. As evil and attack myself and feel guilty and. And all that. So I thought the phrase imperial Affliction captures that very nicely. Of course, she's talking about, right, the ray of light that comes from God in a way. And that's why it's the Imperial Affliction. And that's the way I would unfold that. 33:13 Erin: Or it could be news from the US Government, sent by mail. No, I think actually this perfectly leads into my reading of the fourth stanza. I hope I'm going to try and think on my feet and make this connection. But we have in the fourth stanza a sort of recapitulation of the whole life cycle, of the light which was with us for the first three stanzas, and then we have the. When it comes and then when it goes, whereas the previous are describing when it's here. But the shadows hold their breath. I thought of. I think it's number 407. One need not be a chamber to be haunted, which is one of the poems in which she describes an assassin. And the assassin hid in our apartment. And so there's a scary moment of being locked in with the assassin, or the idea of hiding from an assassin, which I think is related to this. The landscape, listens, the shadow, hold their breath. You know, the slant of light is this killer that's coming in to get us. And everybody's sort of frozen or playing dead or hiding or something. And what happens in that poem, as I said, is that it turns out the assassin is some part of us. Because the thing that the assassin is inside is the body or the mind. And I think this is actually. This is then related to this whole idea of conscience and the idea of the call coming from inside the house. Right. I'm trying to make the connection. I'm doing a bad job. But I think if that's the way we want to read this, it's related to what you're talking about, if I'm not mistaken. 34:40 Wes: Yeah. I think this is one way of reading. I mean, you could, you know, not knowing anything about Dickinson's relationship with religion, you can read it in the nihilistic or religiously skeptical way, or you can read this in a way that's consistent with being religious. Right. Am I too optimistic about that? 34:58 Erin: I think you're too optimistic about her religion. 35:03 Wes: You know, this stanza reminded me of Genesis a little bit for some reason. And the idea of God arriving on the scene, and Adam and Eve realize they're naked. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. I think I make the association because it's almost as if God is the breeze. And there's something. Something about. I think here it's like God is such a presence. And believe me, this is just completely free association. I'm not making any solid claims, but my own personal, free associations to the stanza. It's the idea that when God does come to Earth, in whatever form he comes, whether that's literally. If he's literally coming down to talk to Adam and Eve, or if it's just conscience, or if it's inspiration or something to do with faith. How? However you want to think about it. His presence is so potent that the landscape is personified. It becomes animated. Right. Shadows hold their breath. The landscape listens. It's as if the earth now is so alive because God's presence is so potent, even the rocks are scared. Something like that. So if we want to give this a reading in terms of conscience again, when conscience arrives, there's nothing that can escape. It almost gets to us at a physical level. It's there in the body. Even the body listens to it. Shadows hold their breath. Wow, that's a great line. 36:35 Erin: Yeah. 36:35 Wes: Because the shadow of the thing is not even the thing. Right. Maybe. Am I so guilty? Do I feel so guilty that even my shadow feels guilty? 36:45 Erin: Is that how bad it is? 36:48 Wes: That kind of thing, you know? 36:51 Erin: Do we take this to mean, literally speaking, do we take this to mean that the shadows, how are they holding their breath? I mean, is this describing a lengthening? Or is it describing the fact that the shadows, when they hold their breath, they disappear for a second, in which case they're gone. They don't exist. They hold their breath and they destroy themselves momentarily. They black out. 37:13 Wes: Yeah. 37:14 Erin: Except they white out. They don't, you know, there's no shadow. 37:19 Wes: Yeah. It's light that casts a shadow. Right. So the light hits us. The shadow should be there. And in this case. Well, if the beam of light is just penetrating into us and becoming the imperial affliction, then why wouldn't the shadows go away? Of course, maybe all the light goes into us and there's no extra. Right, the shadow. The shadow depends on the light being present in some places and then not in others. But in a way, we humans might be a lightning, kind of lightning rod that attracts all the light, in a sense, in which case the shadows would vanish entirely. 37:53 Erin: The coming of the light, I'm imagining at the moment that it happens, the shadows are lengthening on the ground. Right. If we imagine, say, the clouds parting for a second and the light coming in and the shadows suddenly grow. To me, that's taking a breath. No, I mean, you can picture this multiple different ways. I love the idea of the shadows holding their breath. It's brilliant. And I think that implies kind of like standing still, as I'm describing with the assassin thing. 38:22 Wes: Yep. I like that. Yeah. So we have different readings. In one of them, the shadows are personified and they're having an emotional response. In another, they're just disappearing. Maybe because. Right. All of the light goes into its object and there's none to serve as A foreground or, you know, and then in this last one, they stop moving, Right? Yeah. With time, it's like time stops, time stands still. 38:50 Erin: Yeah. And then when it. When it goes to, like the distance on the look of death, I thought of the. Again, this is. That's why I was reading some Civil War stuff back into. Into stanza three, because I thought of the light going out of the eyes of the. Of someone on the battlefield. Soldier on the battlefield. So the light gone out of the eyes means it's now elsewhere, distant or something. So the corpse or the person itself is now distant from us. Whatever was inside that person is now elsewhere. So there's a distance between us now and the thing, the corpse that used to be a person or something, because it's also the look of death. So we could see that the look of death is only visible to us insofar as it actually occupies a face. Right. It in itself is abstract. It needs to be. It needs a human to attach to so that we could see the look of death. Because I don't think she's talking about, you know, the Grim Reaper, which is, you know, he is himself, I think, faceless. Right. He's just a hood with a. With black. Right. So there is no, practically speaking, in that particular image, there is no look of death, or there is of the body, but not the face, you know, so the distance on the look of death, to me, visually, when I picture it, it has to be applied to a face, someone's face, to be active. And I wonder if that's related to some of the things that we've been talking about prior to this. The idea that the landscape has to be animated with our own projection onto it somehow. Yeah. Just like we can be the slant of light going out, I guess we are also the look of death or something, you know. 40:30 Wes: So the distance on the look of death, if you think about the eyes of a person who has died and they have that kind of distant stare. Right. Obviously, we can tell they're no longer functioning and no longer looking at anything, no longer focused on anything. That's what I take to be this distance on the look of death. Sort of eyes that are looking into nowhere. And so it's an image for soullessness or for the departure of the spirit. Right. The body is no longer animated and there's no longer a soul or a spirit or however you want to put it. And in a way that that look, it captures that. Right. Somehow. And of course, at that point, that's precisely when there is no more Right. The internal difference where the meanings are there is that place is gone now because I take that place to be the soul. Right. And that's what happens when the. That's the downside of the slant of light leaving. It's a seal of despair. It's an imperial affliction. But when it goes, look at what we're left with, it sounds like it's indispensable. Or has it just damaged us so much that, you know, again, one is giving a critique of religion or morality. Perhaps if we weren't so damaged by, by those such things, then this would not be the aftermath. But as it is, we've been so shaped by it, we can't live without it, even though it is such an affliction. 41:54 Erin: I love that. 41:55 Wes: But the other way to read this is just that, right? This, this is part of you reading this religiously. This is part of the burden of freedom and free will. And we being human and being conscious and having a soul is that we, we can do right and wrong and we will do wrong and we will suffer for it. And the alternative is to not be alive. 42:14 Erin: Well, that's fun. 42:18 Wes: Either way, it's a win win. 42:23 Erin: The life giving slant of despair and affliction. This hadn't even occurred to me that it is. Yeah, I like this. This, I like both readings, but I like what you said, that it's. That it is indispensable without pain. What are we 42:39 Wes: for the next part we'll be reading Dickinson's poem, no pain, no gain. It's about her personal fitness trainer. 42:54 Erin: The slant of light that follows her around the yard. She has to outrun it. Yeah, good. Well, all right, let's leave off there and then in our final part, part four, we will discuss number 315. He fumbles at your soul. 43:09 Wes: Thank you, thank you. 43:14 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. 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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477. Upcoming Episodes: Rosemary’s Baby. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: [email protected]. Hey, welcome to Part two of our discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part one, we talked about number 340 in the Franklin numbering system. I felt a funeral in my brain. And in this part we'll talk about number 372. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, which I think think kind of tread some some ground that we've already talked about with its boots of lead tread some ground we've already talked about in in part one. So I think kind of Makes a good pair. I guess I'll go ahead and read it first and then we'll dive right in. 1:03 Wes: Yeah. 1:03 Erin: Okay. After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs. The stiff heart questions was it he that bore and yesterday or centuries before the feet mechanical go round a wooden way of ground or air or ought regardless grown a quartz contentment like a stone. This is the hour of lead remembered, if outlived as freezing Persons recollect the snow first chill, then stupor, then the letting go. 1:42 Wes: So, yeah, we're getting this image of feeling of numbness, I suppose, that comes after great pain. Except she chooses a very interesting variation on that idea, which is formality. So it's a formal feeling. And then she's using this word ceremonious in the second line. Right. So formal as in ceremony or in social form. I suppose you could even say impoliteness. And all the. The. In the social face that we put on things, the thing that covers up are, you know, more complicated and visceral and often intense feelings that lie beneath. Is that right? 2:22 Erin: Yeah, I think so. You know, this. This poem, I wonder if it's almost describing the exact same experience as. As the poem we covered in the previous part, but just with a. With a darker valence. Because there's. There's a sense of. In the formality, there's a sense of a funeral, of the funereal. You know, the nerves sit ceremonious, so it's as if you're sitting through a funeral. But then what's really great about that is that they're like tombs. So she connects this idea of the funeral, or of the funeral, of ceremony and of formality, with stiffness, which itself is, you know, it's like a Russian doll image that itself has the implication of death and the tomb and, you know, something like rigor mortis inside it. 3:05 Wes: Calling it a tomb is. I mean, it's a really interesting image because we think of nerves as, like Mrs. Bennet, nerves. 3:12 Erin: You have no compassion on my poor nerves. They're very active. They're vibrating all the time. 3:18 Wes: Right. So, yeah, we think of nerves as, I guess, cylindrical threads, tubes high strung, like the Internet, tubes that run through our body and conveyors of pain. And so the nerves are no longer active here. So they've been very active. And now they're dead, in a sense, they've been deadened. They're tomb like. But again, we get this idea of sitting ceremonious as if the tomb is a monument to Something lost, something has died. Right. You know, I think the funeral. You know, your reference to funeral is good. Something has died and, you know, the pain that was there is gone. It's died. And it's like losing someone. 4:01 Erin: Yeah. Which is a really interesting idea if it's the pain itself that's lost. You know, I never thought about that. That's really interesting. 4:09 Wes: More ordinarily, Right. We're in pain because of what we've lost or someone that we've lost. But in this case. So I'm giving it. Yeah. A less orthodox way of reading it, which is that the pain itself is the thing that's been lost when we're in the state of numbness. Yeah. 4:24 Erin: Right. No, I really like that. I think. I hadn't thought of that. So I'm kind of thinking on my feet now, but I'm. You know, when you're in real physical pain, mileage may vary on this experience, but real physical pain, it sort of obliterates everything. 4:42 Wes: Right. 4:43 Erin: And then afterwards, that kind of like. I don't know, that resounding sense. I'm thinking of the bell from the previous stanza. Maybe something about that rings after. But you're also like. It's also hard to recall physical pain after it's over, you know, so. So there's. There's this heightened. It's. It's reminding me of what we talked about in part one, with the tinnitus crowding everything out. That's kind of like pain. And then afterwards, the silence is kind of. You know, you almost can't recall what the pain was like. And the silence becomes a kind of numbness. I don't know. I want to. There's a better connection that I could be making there, or rather a more clear way, one, I think, between these two qualities. But I think they're all interrelated insofar as we can just say that our idea of pain, of emotional pain, probably only comes from our experience of physical pain, which is maybe. I don't know that I want to say that, but the words that we use, the fact that we would use pain for an emotional pain, which is something quite different from physical pain, almost seems to me then to be related to the idea of. I felt a funeral in my brain. And this. This contrast that we kept making in part one between the corporeal and the spiritual, or even like the vacuum of space, all this other stuff. Right. So I think that those two senses of pain. What I'm trying to say, those two senses of pain aren't really Interrelated. And it's important that maybe both readings kind of coexist here. 6:05 Wes: Yeah. 6:05 Erin: So we have the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? So again, we have this idea of, you know, of death, right. Because the tombs, the idea of stillness, the still heart does not beat, the stiff heart doesn't beat. And so that's another further idea of this is almost physical pain resulting in death, some physical injury that's resulted in death, and now what's left over is just this deadened state. But I was interested because these two lines I'd never given much attention to, frankly. Was it he that bore in yesterday or centuries before? You know, it's a. It's talking about Christ's passion, right. Another one suffering as being maybe profound as that or joined to that. But on this reading, I was interested maybe in the idea of the formality inherent in this connection. Seeing oneself or trying to see oneself within a structure, the structure that Christ's Passion, say, for the Christian, tries to give to suffering an explanation, a sense of its purpose. So the idea of trying to use a structure to make sense of something, but one can't make sense of it. Trying to use a referent, a historical basis, some kind of reason, maybe even just why the suffering happens, you know, it happened because of this. Any kind of structure to try to make sense of something seems to me to be inherent in that idea of formal. 7:26 Wes: Right. 7:27 Erin: But when the thing is actually so, so painful that it obliterates reason, you know, the formality after the fact of trying to make sense of it has less and less purchase, which is, I think, why the speaker doesn't know, can't remember, you know, what's the difference between this historical person and me? Because the structure is all, all, all confused. 7:46 Wes: So the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? What? Bore the sins of mankind? 7:55 Erin: Yeah. Or bore the pain of the Passion, if we want to say there's another. Right. 7:59 Wes: Was it he that suffered for us? 8:01 Erin: Yes. 8:02 Wes: Yeah. So I'm wondering, is the stiff heart doubting now? Is it having a crisis of faith, or is it trying to relocate pain right to Christ? Is it Christ's pain or is it my pain? 8:17 Erin: Yeah, I think it's both of those things. 8:19 Wes: And yesterday or centuries before, so we could see, you know, if the pain that she has experienced is something recent, as in yesterday. Then the question becomes, yeah, is this my pain that I felt yesterday and now that I'm numb to, or is it someone else's pain? Sort of a bit of identity diffusion here, or is It. Christ's pain, which is interesting because it goes along with. That's kind of part of how this numbness after great pain works. Right. It's almost like you're out of your body, you're disassociated, maybe, as you were pointing out. Yeah. It's hard to even remember what that pain exactly was like, and in what sense it's even one's own. So what's happening here? Does it become a. A vehicle to faith or a. It might be the opposite. Does it interfere with faith? I mean, it might be a vehicle to faith in the sense that you realize that the pain can be relocated to Christ. Right. And that if now that it's gone from me, the formal feeling could even be a religion. 9:23 Erin: Right. 9:23 Wes: The ceremonious feeling could be a religious feeling. But if it's a religious feeling, it's not a very passionate religious feeling. 9:30 Erin: Yeah. 9:31 Wes: I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. I didn't quite understand this. 9:33 Erin: Yeah, no, I think that's all. I think that's all, really. 9:35 Wes: Right. 9:36 Erin: And I think that that passion. I think that, you know, she's placing passion and religion on opposite ends of the spectrum. Numbness and formality in religion, I think, are kind of going together in her little drawer here. And that's one of the reasons why this religious thought occurs in this numb, formal kind of mode. When we discuss 320, there's a certain slant of light. I read that poem as making reference to the stigmata and to this, you know, to further this idea of suffering joining with Christ's suffering. And the idea is that it's a. I don't know exactly how this works in the Protestant faith because it's quite different, because Catholics, because they believe in works, they believe that suffering can actually be transformative, that you can actually offer suffering for other people. All this other stuff that has to do with purgation and things that would not have a corollary here. So suffering is probably in Protestantism, just supposed to be instructive and unite you to Christ's suffering in some way. That is. Yeah. You're supposed to be able to understand something about what Christ did for you through. Through that experience of suffering that you kind of join with him in. And maybe. And maybe it'll also teach you something about yourself and the fact that the instructive quality has broken down here. Oh, when did that happen? Right. If I was supposed to learn a lesson from this, but I can't even remember what the point was, you know, What? I mean, like, there's some. Something is really broken down. And so I think that what she's trying to say, you know, maybe I'm reading the biography in here a little too much. Right. But we know that she was a sort of, at times almost anti Christian person, is that if we read pain and suffering through this formal lens, there's actually a diminishment. 11:15 Wes: I see what you're saying. It seems a little sacrilegious in the sense that she's identifying this relocation of pain and I suppose, guilt maybe to Christ's sacrifice. And in that sense, it's as if we're numbing ourselves. We're using religion to numb. It's the opiate of the masses. 11:33 Erin: Exactly, exactly. 11:34 Wes: She's a Marxist. 11:35 Erin: Yes. 11:37 Wes: Yeah. So it does. Yeah. You know, on reflection, just talking to you about this, it does seem like a bit of a critique. 11:44 Erin: Yeah, I think she's frequently doing that. 11:46 Wes: You know, I imagine her sitting in church and the formality of it and just being bored and being like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna write a poem about how much this sucks. 11:57 Erin: Yeah. 11:58 Wes: But specifically, it could be the funeral service, which also can be pretty boring, honestly. 12:04 Erin: Oh, of course, of course. And I think any of that, you know, any ritualistic funeral service, communal, religious, it's all kind of related to this critique because we wouldn't have those rituals and those funerals if it weren't for the religion undergirding it. Right. So it's all bad. It's all boring. 12:22 Wes: Can feel like it hasn't. It doesn't do justice to the real person because you have someone just reciting something or. Right. You know, hopefully you have a good eulogy or. 12:33 Erin: Yes. 12:34 Wes: People speaking in. Maybe in an impassioned way to the life of the person. But to the extent that there's a priest or someone like that giving a. I don't know what they give, what they give a sermon at a funeral or homily. But to the extent you hear them speak a little bit. Right. Some are good and some are not so good. Not every priest is such a good public speaker. And so it kind of mars the whole thing, in all honesty, in my experience. 13:04 Erin: That's right. You know, she frequently. Dickinson, in her poems, compares herself to a volcano. You know, Vesuvius at home is the famous title of Adrienne Rich's. Yeah. Like she. There's this one poem that I love called A Still Volcano Life, which is one of my favorite poems of hers, in which she says that a quiet earthquake style. Well, I'm not gonna get it right. But my nature is Vesuvian side. Naples. The north cannot detect. So anyway, she compares herself with the city south and northerners, not kind of understanding the sort of, you know, Vesuvian eruption that she has going on underneath the surface. And in moments like these, and talk of funerals like these. 13:41 Wes: I do declare. Right. 13:43 Erin: No, well, yes, a different kind of Southerner. But it always. I always think to myself, like, oh, what? Dickinson's whole mind would have been changed if she'd just been to one Italian funeral because there's so performative and ridiculous. Actually, they're not anymore since. Since people have been given drugs to sedate them at this point. But, you know, nothing ceremonious about watching your great aunt throw herself into a. Into a hole. 14:10 Wes: Right, right. 14:12 Erin: And people like literally tearing out their hair. Anyway, there was. See, that's why. That's. You know, that just really. It's silly that I even bring this up. However, I think that Dickinson is looking for that kind of thing. You know, she's comparing herself to this all the time because she's like, where's the real emotion? Where's. Where's the. She's sort of like this inner Italian who needs to. Or Mediterranean person who needs to have, you know, some sort of dramatic. 14:35 Wes: Or. 14:36 Erin: If we want to think of the American south, she's like, you know, she'd love Tennessee Williams. You know, she wants to just break out and go totally crazy and flip out. 14:43 Wes: Well, who wouldn't? She's in a very puritan New England environment, Right? 14:47 Erin: Yes. There was a second great awakening at the time, and the idea that she needed to make a profession of faith which was performative and perhaps somewhat emotional, which she refused to do. But that's, I think, a very different style of emotion than the one that she might be idealizing. 15:04 Wes: But she was religious ultimately, Is that right or. No? That's the impression I got. She wasn't. 15:09 Erin: No, I would say not. I would say very much not religious. I think she's anti Christian to the point of being. It looks like religion oftentimes because she's using it as something to kind of like, push off. I think she wishes. I think she wishes she could be religious. And she's oftentimes sacrilegious. It's complicated, but I think ultimately she abandons. She's really not a typical person of her era and her place in that regard. So it's strange sometimes to read some of the poems. 15:40 Wes: So the second stanza. Yeah, it sounds like she's become Like a puppet or a marionette. 15:47 Erin: Yeah, I like that. 15:49 Wes: The feet mechanic will go around a wooden way and then that way, you know, we go. It's ground or air or odd, I suppose. Odd as in anything. 16:00 Erin: Yeah, something else. Odd else. Something else. Yeah, I guess she misspells it. 16:05 Wes: Yeah, the wooden way or whatever it is that the feet are going to be on. It doesn't have to be ground, it could be air. It could be anything really. What does that mean? 16:15 Erin: Yeah, the wooden way. You know, I'm thinking again of the creaking across the floor, you know, the floorboards of a church maybe, or of a house. The round. I guess that would have to be a track. But it's also sort of. I'm thinking of her kind of going all the way around the world. You know, the circumference that she goes out upon in another poem. But the wooden way. I thought of wood because it's regardless grown. I don't know how to read that. But yeah, it could be wood or it could be ground or you could be walking on air or something else. It doesn't matter what you're walking on because you're not paying attention because you're not engaging with your surroundings. And then I thought of. Yeah, so the floor, whether you're inside or outside, there's a singularity into which everything is collapsed into sort of meaning meaninglessness. 17:04 Wes: Right. So there is no. In a sense, there is no ground. I mean one is numb and one is. Because become like a puppet devoid of emotion, devoid of subjectivity. And then there's also no firm ground on which one is moving. And then regardless groan, which is. I suppose we're taking that to be. Well, it may be refer to the contentment itself, I don't know. Or the wooden way. Regardless. Groan. A quartz contentment like a stone. Yeah. This kind of lifelessness and formal feeling have now become a kind of contentment. And regardless grown, regardless of where they come from. 17:45 Erin: Yeah, this pushes against the mechanical. So this is the surprise one feels when the seasons change or flowers grow or something like that. And you find still things are still going on even though you expect them to have stopped because you're numb to them. Maybe it's even the speaker herself who is growing and moving on without thinking it possible. But another thing I was thinking of actually with the feet mechanical go round. Of course, this movement should. Should have alerted me to it. Right. Maybe it's the hands of the clock going around. So the hour growing late, things, things going on, things getting, you know, the Hour growing, whatever the. The day growing dark. Something like that. And of course it's. It can also be feat. Of course, in a poem, gotta think of poetic feat. So she's still writing this poem somehow. And regardless the poem is growing, regardless of her pain, she's able to write. And what is it ought? Maybe it's the words, maybe it's the ink and paper or something like that. 18:47 Wes: Wow. Yeah, this is cool. 18:48 Erin: And to the mechanicalness though, and the provisional idea that it could be this or it could be that kind of butts up against the mechanical in that same way. I think maybe the jagged lines here. Right. Are kind of destroying the mechanics of a typical poem. Cause this is a very strange formal poem for what she's talking about. It starts with four lines of pentameter, so we almost think it's about to be a sonnet. There's 13 lines and it's not. And in the middle we get something that's almost like a ballad stanza, but broken. So we get 4, 2, 3, 2, 4 is the stress pattern over five lines. So it's not the typical four line ballad stanza, the common meter. And then the last stanza we get three, three, and then two lines of pentameter to ant. To end. So there's something really wonky about this middle stanza. And then the poem kind of like regains its footing at the end. So it's performing something. The mechanics she's talking about are actually breaking down. And that seems to me to be related to this idea that she can't find. She's just going through the motions. But actually, what is it? What's under her feet? What's going on? The feet are kind of. They're mechanical and yet tripping over themselves here in the middle. Just free associating here. 20:02 Wes: Yeah, Yeah. 20:03 Erin: I don't know if that's all right, but. 20:04 Wes: No, it's interesting to. Yeah. To associate it with the poem itself and the formality of the poem, the form of the poem and the question of whether it's mechanical or whether it rises to the level of expression. Right. Whether it's just nerves sitting ceremonious or whether some feeling is coming through it. But in any case, we get this quartz contentment as a correlate of the numbness that comes after pain. 20:33 Erin: I'm even wondering, looking at that first stanza, it occurs to me that there are lots of Latinate words in there and it's quite formal. So this middle stanza represents a real disturbance. And then quartz contentment on the outside. Quartz maybe. Does it look just like a regular stone. And it's when you break it that you discover that it has that kind of geode. 20:56 Wes: I'm not sure. I just think of it as looking like diamond, but I don't know. 21:01 Erin: Right. Cause it is itself quite beautiful. But if you get it just in a raw unbroken form, it can look like just a beautiful kind of milky rock. Is that right? 21:10 Wes: Right, Yeah, I mean I think it's milky. It looks kind of like you know, remember the original Superman where he his cave? 21:19 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 21:20 Wes: With all those. It's kind of like got a pillar like it's a bunch of like pillar like things clustered together. It's a really like a prototypical crystalline structure. That's what we're meant to think of as that crystalline structure. But yeah, it's some of it see through. It's not entirely necessarily see through, but I don't think it's like granite. I don't think it's like opaque rock on the outside. And then you break it open. As far as I know. I'm speculating. 21:46 Erin: No, you're right. I think it's. I was thinking it looks like a rock, but it looks like. Like it has that beautiful color but it's shaped like a rock. And then when you break it. I was, I was trying to connect this to There are two ripenings, A poem of hers where she talks about the maturing and the burr versus the outward maturing. So I thought something about like being split open. But yeah, it doesn't work. 22:06 Wes: I don't think it's like that, but I'm not entirely sure. But it is something. You know, crystalline structures are structures that grow too. 22:15 Erin: Oh, right, right. 22:17 Wes: And she would know that with her study of science. Yeah, they're almost like they're inorganic, but the way they grow and the way they work is a kind of proto organic in a weird way. It's like self organizing quality of crystals. 22:33 Erin: I see. I was really thinking of regardless grown in terms of what came above it. But of course grammatically in every other way it would refer to the quartz. The contentment. 22:44 Wes: Yeah, I mean I was thinking it could go either way. I was a little bit confused about that. But yeah, that's one possible reading is. Yeah. Contentment. Wherever it comes from, or whatever its grounds, you know, ground or air or oxygen, contentment is the outcome regardless of where it comes from. 22:59 Erin: Maybe quartz looking like ice, you know. So we could think of this as like an icy contentment, but it won't. But it's an ice that won't melt, it'll keep growing, you know, because contentment is such an odd word to use here because to be contented, you know, this is to be contented because you're dead and you don't care anymore, you know, which is not really contentment. So she's kind of using this in a slightly ironic and sort of sad way. So, yeah, thinking about that. Like an ice that doesn't melt, so it just stays or keeps growing and it's like this boxiness. The beauty of it is what I can't reckon with. So maybe it's this, you know, the iciness that we can make the connection to. Not quite beauty. 23:37 Wes: Yeah, I like this iciness. 23:39 Erin: Yeah. 23:40 Wes: I mean it's hard like a stone. It's crystalline. It's not entirely transparent, but it's not. So it's not entirely see through but of course it's not. Not completely opaque to light. But yeah, it conveys this sense of numbness has become hardness, but it's also contentment. She is a rock. She's an island. 24:05 Erin: Solitude. 24:06 Wes: Rock has no name. Is it? A rock has no name and an island never cries. 24:10 Erin: I don't know. 24:11 Wes: I mean, you can name your rock, right? I think they're wrong about that. 24:15 Erin: That's true. 24:16 Wes: Did the pet rock craze take off 24:17 Erin: right after that song? Little googly eyes on her piece of quartz. That's Emily. Yeah. No, then we get, you know, another thing I was thinking of just in terms of, you know, quartz and then stone and then lead. It seems like there's a progression happening there towards more and more bleakness. It seems like the growing, you know, which might be the quartz itself growing. I love that idea. The growing is sort of into more and more hardness and kind of. I mean, lead gets a bad rap. Lead is actually quite beautiful in its unmanipulated state. Right. In its more natural state. But the. 24:53 Wes: As long as it's not in your paint, then you're. It's great. 25:00 Erin: But it seems that there's a growing heaviness and also a growing portent in the progression from quartz to stone to lead. Words are kind of growing in the direction of the increasingly shut down, heavy, deathlike state. 25:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean we go from formality and nerves that are like tombs to a marionette which at least can still move. Right. It's a replica of a human being and it. In this wooden way. So we get these wood images and then suddenly it's stone or quartz, which is. It's not quite rock. But then suddenly we're at lead and then. Yeah. So we're making a descent here. 25:48 Erin: I like that. And tombs too. You know, I think of stone, obviously, but hollow. There's a middle cutout. But then we just get stone through and through. So there's almost like a merging of the body and the space inside the tomb with the quality of being dead itself. The whole thing becomes solid. It becomes. 26:07 Wes: Yeah. Lead is not crystalline. It's. Right. It doesn't have this replicated structure inside unless you go down to the atomic level or molecular level. And it's not transparent at all, obviously. And it's very dense and very heavy. So this is the hour of lead remembered if outlived. 26:26 Erin: I love that one. 26:27 Wes: Wow. As freezing persons recollect the snow from first chill, then stupor, then letting go. So suddenly someone's freezing to death. Do I have this right? 26:36 Erin: Yes. Yes. 26:37 Wes: And that's the image. Someone's freezing. 26:39 Erin: And I looked it up. These are, in fact, the stages of hypothermia. 26:41 Wes: Right. 26:42 Erin: So smart. Yeah. I love the remembered. If outlived. I love the conditional. If you even survive this, then here's what happens. Wow. So. So good. I love that line. And then these last two lines are probably my two favorite lines in Dickinson. I don't think anybody has written two better lines than these. Ha, ha. Anyway, I have goosebumps. 27:03 Wes: And that is true. They do say you at a certain point, don't. Supposedly you get some sort of euphoria right. Before you. Yes. 27:11 Erin: Before you die. 27:12 Wes: When you're freezing to death, or you just don't care. 27:14 Erin: Yeah. And you get really warm. Right. Because you take off everything because you get so warm after a while. That, too, I thought of not as anything like a primary or even a secondary reading, the letting go, the divesting oneself of clothes as a reaction to the cold, which is this incredibly amazing paradoxical phenomenon that happens. So I was just gonna say, isn't it, that when they find people who have died from freezing, they sometimes find them undressed? Am I making this up? 27:44 Wes: I mean. Yeah, I've heard this too. No, I think I've heard the same thing. Yeah. So she's comparing. So it's odd, right, because she's comparing. She wants to say that the hour of lead is, if you live beyond it, remembered as freezing persons. Remember the snow. But then she describes freezing persons actually dying. So, you know, I suppose if you were revived. Right. If you got to the point where you let go as a freezing person and then were revived, and then you said, tell me about how you recollect the snow freezing person, 28:21 Erin: and they would 28:22 Wes: say, oh, it's just like the hour of lead going backwards through. Right. Yeah. So what is she saying here? 28:30 Erin: Yeah, the letting go could be read as the thing that actually restores you. So this is. If you do outlive it somehow by letting go, you live through it. Right. Because that's actually the description of the being restored to life. There has to be in the parallel, there has to be the outliving. So the letting go somehow means at once restored to life and letting go of life. 28:58 Wes: Yeah. So it's another image of mourning, right? This letting go. 29:02 Erin: Yeah, but it's like the final mourning, because that you've gone through the mourning process and now you let go, even of the grief. 29:09 Wes: Mm. 29:10 Erin: I don't know. 29:14 Wes: Yeah, no, it's. It's really interesting because it. Yeah. It implies that. That outliving this hour of lead or outliving terrible pain and loss involves something analogous to the moment where you surrender to your impending death. Let's put it that way. 29:32 Erin: That's great. 29:33 Wes: Is this the five stages of grief? Is that what she's talking about? First you die in the snow, and then you. 29:40 Erin: Yeah. In your outside reading, did you see her little pamphlet, Grief and Hypothermia? A guide? 29:50 Wes: Right. This should be what they give you. Yeah. If you're going to Alaska. One of the pamphlets is how to Avoid Hypothermia. The other is Grief and Hypothermia. This is what you can make of it metaphorically. 30:07 Erin: The chapters are Chill, Stupor, and Letting Go. If you experience stupor, don't be disoriented. I'm preparing you for it. 30:19 Wes: So the way beyond the hour of lead is to let go. 30:23 Erin: But we haven't even talked about the craziest part of these two lines. As freezing persons recollect the snow, then why are they freezing? Are they freezing right now, remembering the thing that they're in right now? 30:36 Wes: Yeah. This is part of my confusion. 30:38 Erin: Did you already say this? 30:40 Wes: No, not exactly. Because it's not. It's not freezing persons ultimately. Right. First chill, then stupor. Stupor. And then letting go. It's as people who have frozen to death recollect the snow. That's the parallel. 30:53 Erin: Yes. You did say that, right? 30:55 Wes: Yeah. 30:56 Erin: The person who survived that, or their 30:58 Wes: person who almost froze to death. Yeah. And then you wake them up, but either way. 31:03 Erin: And then they're somehow still frozen. They're still freezing. This is. You know, the parallel to me now is I think I've even talked about this on the podcast before because, you know, I'm obsessed with people who get shipwrecked and have to survive on the ocean and they have to eat each other and et cetera, et cetera. When you go through that period of extreme starvation, you're hungry, like, for the rest of your life. 31:27 Wes: Oh, wow. 31:27 Erin: You can never. Yeah. This is a phenomenon that if you starve long enough, and they have recorded cases of this, that people were stockpiling food after these experiences for the rest of their lives, no matter how much they ate, they could never get hungry. It was like the body just got used to this starvation. If it's long enough, I think the body learns that you might at any moment be subject to this again, that it actually, like, burns. You know, you eat and eat and eat. And they never got fat from it, and they were always, always hungry. And so there's something. I wonder if there's something about this here where, like, okay, it's a person who survived almost freezing to death, and that makes them freezing for the rest of their lives. They've seen something. They've been almost on the other side or, you know, and now their permanent state is kind of being freezing. 32:16 Wes: Well, yeah, if the freezing is permanent. Right. That seems kind of a bleak end to this, because in a way, this is all about being frozen in the wake of pain. But a more optimistic reading is that one can get beyond the point of freezing by letting go. 32:33 Erin: How does recollection work, then? Because, you know, we could put pressure on each one of these words. So interesting. Does the recollection cause the freezing? So if we've let go, is recollection possible, or is it, at the very least, dangerous? And can the danger of recollection result in the freezing? There's almost cart before the horse in the line here because they're recollecting the snow, they're back to freezing again. So it's like a circularity that. You know what I'm saying? Because you've let it go, it should be out of you. But then if you recollect it, you get freezing again, and you have to go through the cycle of letting it go. 33:10 Wes: Okay, so here's the way I'm reading it. So suppose you did almost freeze to death and you had that experience of letting go and getting naked. I'm so warm. I feel amazing just doing snow angels right as you're about to die, and then they find you naked in a snow angel, which is really embarrassing. I don't know. How you would ever live beyond that? Frankly, I'd kill myself. Supposing you got over the embarrassment, then how would you remember the snow from that memory? What would you think of when you thought of the snow? Would you think of, oh, oh yeah, I don't ever want to be around snow again because that was freezing. Or would you think of the euphoric moment or the moment of letting go? Would you think of it? Would you associate snow with giving in to that moment of death and accepting it and no longer fearing it? If it's the second, then that's the way. I suppose the more optimistic reading of this is that this is the way once you get through the hour of lead, which almost, almost kills you, but if you can get through it without it killing you, then you will no longer be numb, you will no longer be frozen. What you will remember about it is that you gave. In some sense, you gave in, you gave up to the possibility of it destroying you. But it didn't. And I mean, you remember almost being destroyed, but the significance of it is not, oh, I had a near death experience, it's I accepted the possibility of death and now I have that as a memory. 34:42 Erin: Huh, I like that. I think too about this may be a stupid connection. You know, how relatively easy it is. I'm putting this in air quotes. Give up an addiction to a substance that you don't need to live on. But how difficult it is, for instance, to overcome addictions to food, which you do need. You can't give up food cold turkey to get over an addiction. Right? Well, if you live in New England, you can't really give up snow cold turkey, can you? So there's something about, there's something about death and the cyclical nature. Things like this are going to happen to you again and again. That seems to be important. The cycle, the cyclical part. In terms of the year, it's the winter when it'll snow again and you'll get triggered remembering the time that you were found in a snow angel. But also people will keep dying. It's going to keep happening. You know what I'm saying? So the confrontation is repeatable. It's repeated. 35:34 Wes: Yeah. This isn't the only loss or moment of great pain you're going to experience in life. It's going to happen again. 35:39 Erin: Is that what yes. 35:40 Wes: You're saying? And when it comes to you. Yeah. This memory that you've had of it almost killing you, but not. And the acceptance of that becomes a new. That's, you know, you can look at future moments of pain, of great pain through that lens, or it informs the way you experience future moments of great pain. Maybe. 36:02 Erin: Yeah. And I like the idea that it's such a, you know, almost freezing to death. That's such an exceptional experience. So I like the fact that there's this. It gets at the exceptional nature of any great pain, which feels as though it is this thing that only happens to one in millions of people. That they would be on the brink of that kind of death and be saved from it somehow is an exceptional experience. And yet it's talking about something in a language of snow. We all understand hypothermia, even if we haven't experienced it. And most of us have seen snow. And we're all reading this poem, understanding something about this pain in our own. You know what I mean? It gets at that sense in which grief makes you feel exceptional, in that nobody has ever experienced this, and yet it's intensely common. It's what it means to be a human. 36:54 Wes: I live in Boston, so I have to let go every time I leave the apartment. Yep, it's freezing. I'm gonna die. It's cost of doing business. No, but yeah. Yeah, I like that. 37:07 Erin: Okay, so I think we'll end part two there. We're gonna do two more episodes on Dickinson. Maybe more if we really get addicted. 37:15 Wes: One more recording. Two more parts. 37:16 Erin: Two more parts. That's right. In part three, we're gonna cover number 320. There's a certain slant of light speaking of snow in Boston and affliction. And then we will, in part four, cover number 477. He fumbles at your soul. I think a good way to end with a crazy sonnet. All right, thank you, Wes. 37:37 Wes: Thank you. 37:40 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain “wider than the sky,” the central fact of Emily Dickinson’s life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self-imposed constraint—of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom—proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which “went out upon circumference,” and to which no subject, tone, or emotion was foreign. Erin & Wes discuss four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477. Upcoming Episodes: Rosemary’s Baby. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain wider than the sky, the central fact of Emily Dickinson's life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas wentworth higginson in 1869, I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town. Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self imposed constraint of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom, proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which went out upon circumference and to which no subject, tone or emotion was foreign. Today, in the first of a four part series on Dickinson, we're discussing four of her best loved poems whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity and encounters with the divine numbers 340, 372, 320 and 477. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, have you seen any of the many Dickinson TV shows or films that have come out in the past? I guess since I don't know, the Belle of Amherst or something, have you seen any of these kind of newer adaptations? 1:56 Wes: No. I know there's one where she's a lesbian, which I refuse to see, but 2:02 Erin: people just got into an argument about this in a class that I was in a few weeks ago about whether or not she was a lesbian. I think last summer I watched A Quiet Passion, the Terrence Davies film with Cynthia Nixon, which was pretty. I don't know. Terrence Davies movies make me feel uncomfortable for some reason. I'm sure if I, if I interrogated it there would be some explanation, but just, I don't know, the atmosphere of his films or something. And maybe, maybe that's the right thing to feel is uncomfortable. But have you been up to the house? They used the house, I think, in filming. It's so, you know, the outside, it's. I didn't check this, but no, haven't 2:37 Wes: been to the house? No. 2:38 Erin: Oh, wow, you've gotta go as a Bay Stater. Is that the demonym for Massachusetts people? I think it is. 2:44 Wes: Isn't Maryland the Bay State. 2:46 Erin: It might be. Anyway, as a Massachuted. Whatever. As someone from Massachusetts. Yeah, there you go. That's. I was too polite to say. 2:56 Wes: No, it is the Bay State. Yeah. Massa is the Bay State. All right. I just looked it up. 2:59 Erin: Okay. Okay. What is Maryland, the Ocean State? 3:02 Wes: Crab State? 3:03 Erin: No, that's. That's. That's Rhode Island. It's the. I don't know what it is. 3:07 Wes: The Old Line State or the Free State. I've never heard that. I lived in Maryland for quite a while, too. Wow. Okay, Mass. Okay. So as a Bay Stater, I should see Emily Dickinson's house. Yep. 3:19 Erin: Definitely. Are you a fan? A Dickinson fan or. 3:22 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I. You know, I'd been. Been a long time, so I can't say I'm a fan as a. As in the sense I'm terribly familiar recently. But she's amazing. I mean, you know, from what we prepared for and the other reading that I've done. Yeah, she's amazing. She's a true exceptional genius. 3:39 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. I didn't like her as a kid, and it's been a long road to kind of overcome that. I think I was trying to figure out why, and I think it was this book that I had of lives of the writers or something like that, in which I thought that she had bad manners or something. 3:57 Wes: You know, refusing to open your door to talk to people might be considered bad manners. 4:01 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 4:02 Wes: Any. Any. 4:05 Erin: Any example of someone, like, not. Not actively trying to please other people probably horrified me, but I'd love to talk to you. 4:10 Wes: I. I'll talk to you through the door. I'll write you a letter. 4:13 Erin: Right. 4:14 Wes: And I love that. I'll write you letters all day long. 4:17 Erin: Yeah. 4:17 Wes: Ten letters a day if you want, but I'm not coming out. 4:22 Erin: Awesome. Yeah. My committee chair is a huge Dickinson fan and scholar. There are a bunch of people here that are huge Dickinson scholars. So, in fact, I just went to. You know, I was preparing a lot of Dickinson for my exams, and over fall break, I went up to Amherst to see the house, which I've been many other times, but I saw that the flowers around the house, they had, you know, just, like, planted some decorative flowers, and they were all dying because it was late October. And so there was just, like, one plant that had a blossom on it that had rather a flower on it. So I went inside and asked the woman at the desk if I could cut the flower off for a friend of mine. So I was all thrilled. So I. Yeah. So I dried it and brought it back to Utah for my professor and said it was a flower from Dickinson's head. Because she's, you know, my professor's also a gardener and, you know, very interested in Dickinson's, her study of botany. So some random plant that some docent probably put there, but it was growing in her soil. 5:27 Wes: So I was thinking, yeah, she studied botany and a lot of other things. She had a really good liberal arts education. 5:32 Erin: Yes. 5:33 Wes: And I was thinking, reading this. Yeah, this is another sort of perils of a liberal arts education story, because she's an amazing poet on the one hand, but she doesn't want to leave her room on the other. At a certain point, if your education is good enough, why leave your room? Right. Reading about her reclusion, I was thinking, yeah, maybe that's a workable solution. But how does the bathroom thing work? I assume she came out for the bathroom, but yeah, botany. No. 6:04 Erin: And just thinking about that refusal to leave her room. I mean, in a way she's. I guess you might say that she's taking the limitations that were already put on women at that time and almost like turning them into an extreme formal conceit. She's also not bending to any of the societal expectations of women at the same time. But like, insofar as a woman who is, you know, an Amherst housewife is somewhat confined to the house, you know, doesn't get to go out and have adventures and stuff like that. She's like, okay, what if I. What if I take that deadly seriously and just never, ever, ever even leave my room? 6:38 Wes: You know, Wasn't one of her. One of the people involved in the publication of her poetry or just from listening to other podcasts? I didn't listen closely enough, but was engaged in like, orgies and all kinds of sexual adventures. Do you know about that? 6:51 Erin: Yes, I did know about this. This is her brother and her. The woman that the brother had an affair with. I don't know the details of this, but the brother had an affair with a woman with a really memorable name, whose name escapes me. One of those three named people. I gotta look this up now. Mabel. 7:11 Wes: Mary Lou Retton. That's right. 7:13 Erin: Mary Lou Retton. Mabel Loomis Todd. There we go. 7:17 Wes: Okay, yeah. Yes, sounds familiar. And she and her husband had kind of an open relationship. 7:22 Erin: Yes. 7:23 Wes: Yeah. 7:23 Erin: And she had an affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother, who was married to Emily's kind of best friend Susan and sister in law, obviously. Yeah. And then afterwards, Mabel Loomis Todd comes into possession of all of the fascicles. And then she edits everything so that she takes out all of the irregular punctuation and regularizes. She and Higginson, I think, regularize the meter and make all these changes. Yes. But a lot of things that we would not expect were going on in Amherst at that time. So it was not maybe the picture that some people have in their minds of some kind of staid. I mean, at least not in the Dickinson household. In the Evergreens, there was some. Some funny business going on. 8:07 Wes: So anyway, one. One way of rebelling is to get with whatever sexual subculture was available. But Dickinson chose the opposite route. 8:17 Erin: Right. 8:18 Wes: As far as we know. I know scholars would love to speculate that there must be something more. You can't just be a good poet. You have to have people having lots of forbidden sex. 8:26 Erin: Right. I think the scholarship that tended in that direction centers on the fact that some of Emily's letters to Susan were edited after her death. Yeah. So I think Mabel Loomis Todd has a lot to answer for. I mean, a lot of people hate her in Dickinson scholarship. 8:41 Wes: She was jealous, apparently. 8:44 Erin: Yes. But also, I don't know. You know, she could also maybe be credited for Dickinson's literary reputation. I mean, it took a long time for us to get back to the original. Right. But she was the one who kind of saved the stuff and who really was intent on doing something with it. And Vinnie gave it over to her, I think, you know, Vinny didn't really know what to do with it. This is. Sorry, Lavinia, Emily's sister. So if it hadn't gotten into Mabel Loomis Todd's hands, maybe we wouldn't even have the poems at all. 9:08 Wes: Right. So she was very reluctant to publish, although she was corresponding a lot with people in a position to publish her. And she got some encouragement and encouragement to publish. And she published, I think, maybe 10 in her lifetime. But one. Only one that she actually sanctioned. Just going on memory from secondary reading here. But yeah. So I think maybe she had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of publishing. I mean, I think she herself says it. What is it? It's as foreign as her. As the firmament is to fin or something like that. 9:39 Erin: Yeah. She calls it the auction of the mind of man. 9:43 Wes: Right. Okay. Yeah. So there's this anxiety about what that would do to her work if she were publishing for a wider audience. Obviously she had an audience, the people she was sending the poems to. And she was getting a lot of admiration for that. But the idea of going to something broader Seemed to create some anxiety for her. 10:04 Erin: Yeah. And yet, I think, you know, my professor, who loves Dickinson, is convinced that the poems are written with the knowledge that these are going to have a kind of eternal readership, you know, so there's just a delay, maybe. I mean, you know, if she knew Too famous, then it would have really messed up her life. 10:23 Wes: So it would have. It's better to become famous after you're dead. 10:26 Erin: Exactly. 10:27 Wes: She would have just become insufferable and. 10:31 Erin: Oh, you're so cruel about these things. You think everyone's gonna be turned bad when they become famous. There are lots of famous people who are nice. 10:39 Wes: No, I know. I'm not. I'm just joining the anxiety, which is that it seemed like her anxiety is. It would corrupt her and turn her into something insufferable. And that is a danger. But not that it happens to everyone. 10:51 Erin: That it would corrupt the work, I think. I don't know how interested she is. 10:53 Wes: Corrupt the work. 10:54 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, I see. I immediately take it as a character thing. 10:59 Wes: Well, no, I meant both. Yeah. So I was thinking of rock stars. For some reason, I had this flash of an image of her wearing leather pants, just going to the opposite extreme and being a rock star and getting into rock and roll, which would be a little early, I guess, but, you know, for that. Drugs, sex. Drugs and rock and roll. But becoming a badass. 11:23 Erin: You're doing to her what the scholarship obsessed. Obsessed with her is doing. Get Hailee Steinfeld to play her. 11:30 Wes: Yes. I insist you be less pure. Forget about the white dress. So she always wore a white dress, right? 11:39 Erin: Yeah. They have just a copy of the dress, but they have the dress on a little mannequin in the house. So you could see it sort of. Sort of standing there headless. And it's. I don't know. There's something about it that's oddly appropriate. Anyway. 11:51 Wes: That's funny. 11:52 Erin: Should we dive into the first one? I selected three poems, which are all about kind of grief and death. But it's difficult to select poems that don't have that as a theme. So I'm being only slightly facetious. Okay. So we're starting with. And we're using the Franklin numbering, which is. I've talked to several people about this, and the Franklin numbering is considered the. Really the correct numbering. So this is number 340 or I felt a Funeral in My Brain. None of the Dickinson poems are titled, so. No, we'll call it 340. Here we go. I felt a funeral in my brain and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till it seemed that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service like a drum kept beating, beating till I thought my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again. Then space began to toll as all the heavens were a bell and being but an ear and I and silence. Some strange race wrecked solitary here. And then a plank in reason broke and I dropped down and down and hit a world at every plunge and finished knowing then. 13:12 Wes: So I felt a funeral in my brain. She goes right for the bodily, right for the corporeal instead of the mind, Right? 13:24 Erin: Yeah, she has mind later. And then I have this strange lattice thing that I. You probably can't see. It's all in pencil. This strange lattice of, you know, connecting like brain. And then in the second stanza, it's mind. And then in the third it's soul. And then in the fourth it's being. And then finally in the fifth stanza, we get I. She sort of joins with this separated brain that she's talking about in the first line, right? Because there's a separation. I felt a funeral in my brain. The I and the brain are already kind of, you know, they're at opposite ends of that first line and they're sort of disconnected from each other. Strangely, she's disconnected from her own brain or mind in this. You know, what's strange about this poem to me is that a funeral is communal and ritual and involving a community. And so sort of like figuring out who the mourners are in this parallel and what, you know, is shifting. Whereas in something like. Because I could not stop for death, you know, the allegory is much more straightforward. She's the dead person who's, you know, the ghost seeing her own grave and all that. This is much more complex. Trying to track the reference and what she might be referring to with the analogy is, I think, a little more difficult. 14:42 Wes: The use of brain is striking. She said, in my mind or something like that, it's more clearly about her imagining something. And here you kind of get the image of mourners treading about in a space that is actually a physical space. And maybe it's even evocative of being dead and having worms or maggots. I think that's kind of a far out reading. But it's an association I made. So, yeah, that's quite striking to say brain. It gives you a more interesting image and treading. Right. So the mourners are treading within her brain, and her brain is the place where the services being held. 15:29 Erin: Yeah. I like this idea, both of. Both of the maggots and of the corporeal about the brain. You know, I think in somewhere, I remember reading that this might be describing, like, a migraine. You know, somebody had that idea. You know, it seems more likely. Or. I mean, I think that reading works, actually. But I think, you know, most scholars think this is describing some kind of mental breakdown. But the use of the physical, oddly, seems to, as I think you're suggesting, seems to kind of shore up that idea that it is like a mental breakdown or that. I don't know, it calls attention to the sort of. The physicality of that of maybe of depression or of something else. 16:08 Wes: But. 16:08 Erin: Yeah, but I really like this idea of the migraine because of the ear, the ringing in the ear. You know, people, I think, have. Have. Have made that connection. Yeah, you have, I think, more regular migraines than I do. I have. Just weird. Sometimes I'll get, like, the aura without the migraine. But you get terrible migraines and weird auras. So you. You're the expert. 16:27 Wes: Well, it's under control for the most part. Yeah. I get more. The aura. And my aura is a hallucination of the smell of smoke. 16:34 Erin: Right, right. 16:35 Wes: So it's weird. 16:37 Erin: The. The burning pyre. 16:38 Wes: It's more like a fire. A fire in my brain. 16:41 Erin: Yes. 16:41 Wes: I felt a fire in my brain, and it smelled like smoke. And that ain't no joke. 16:48 Erin: That's my problem. 16:50 Wes: But, you know, and I get some nausea and maybe headache, but it's more like the more severe symptoms would be nausea and the smell of smoke, which is very distracting and disturbing. So. So, yeah, so I like this idea that this is related to a migraine, which can feel like a mental breakdown if it's bad enough. 17:07 Erin: Right, right. 17:09 Wes: And in this case. Right. And it. And it gives us. It explains this, like, beating, beating, and my mind is going numb and the treading, treading and all those types of sensations, but I think they're equally apt for describing maybe. Yeah. The onset of some kind of madness, some kind of unreason. Right. The plank in reason breaks at the end, but at the very beginning, sense is breaking through. And it seems to be the treading of the mourners that might help. Sense, breakthrough. And sense I take to be. I take that to be sense as opposed to irrationality. But sense maybe also in the sense of sensory experience, as if. Right. A ray of light might penetrate into the church where the service is being held or something like that. 17:57 Erin: Yeah. I think, you know, the primary fact about a Dickinson poem is compression, and compression in which so many possible readings can work for one line. And they're all right. You know, they're all correct. And I think, you know, you could read that sense so many different ways. But I was thinking about this idea of breaking through, because later reason is the floor. And you could take that to mean that unreason or a lack of sense is sort of like the basement of the mind. You know, the thing that you fall down when you lose your mind is that sense the floor through which the mourners actually are breaking with their force. So that the mourners are actually causing reason to break. They're causing the plank in reason to break. Right. 18:41 Wes: Oh, okay. That makes more sense, actually. 18:43 Erin: But no, but it also works the other way. Right. Which is that. 18:46 Wes: Yeah, so it reads in opposite directions, potentially. 18:49 Erin: Right. 18:50 Wes: The treading of the mourners could be helping her keep it together, or it could be the thing that's threatening to make her lose it. 18:57 Erin: Exactly. And again, like, what are these mourners? You know, are they the senses themselves? You know, are they inside the body? Are they something physical? Are they. You know, later, with the. In the next line, the service like a drum, you know, that could just be taken sort of like as one's heartbeat in one's ears, I think, you know, so are the. Are the mourners kind of just related to that? Is this the pulse? The. What exactly are they mourning? You know, that's. That's the other part of this, that we never find out what's being mourned. What's the dead thing? It becomes her only in the last stanza. It's a funeral for her, for something about her. But what. 19:32 Wes: What would be mourning that she might have said. She might have more clearly conveyed the fact that she is in mourning. But instead it's. She's displaced this onto these little homunculi who are treading around in her brain. And if the second reading, you know, if the second reading that you're proposing is right, then you can see this displacement is sort of a denial of her own mourning. And the denial is kind of crazy, making potentially in that displacement. So that's really interesting again, because then the beating of, you know, the service like a drum, which is a weird image, I don't think, of a funeral service like that. Right. Something that would beat like that. It's as if the prerogatives of mourning or the impulse to mourn. That might be the wrong word, impulse, but they're trying to break through and they're not able to do it. 20:22 Erin: The drum, I thought, was reminiscent of these larger implications of the negative elements of the communal. That's one of the things, I suppose, that's also ambivalent here, is if that fourth line gives the mourners a positive valence, then we might think of the funeral as being, you know, a way. A way to prevent the total mental annihilation of grief. On the other hand, if the funeral is assaulting the sense, the reason, then it's the reverse of that. 20:52 Wes: Right. 20:52 Erin: It's the thing that makes you go crazy. And the drum being related maybe not to funerals, as you're suggesting, but to something like war or, you know, these kinds of lower passions that are communally shared, indicated by a drum. You know what I mean? Like something to. I think, of something communal with a drum. Right. It's about what, Marching ritual. 21:15 Wes: Yeah. And she was most productive during the Civil war, right? From 1861. 21:20 Erin: Yes, yes. 21:20 Wes: 1865. She wrote most of her poems, or at least half, and she wrote a bit about the Civil War and especially about. Yeah. The death and dying involved in the Civil War. So it makes sense. It makes sense, yeah. 21:34 Erin: And one of the readings of her seclusion is that she was so affected by the people around her that were dying. So she was subjected to these funerals, and it made her want to just not participate in the communal, in the social at all. In addition to the, you know, the difficulties that she had with the sort of revivalist Christianity that was going on around her at the time and her refusal to partake in that. So I think the beating drum is indicative of both her own heartbeat, so she's sort of implicated, but also in this kind of ritualistic, social, oppressive kind of valence that something like a funeral might have for her. 22:12 Wes: I mean, I suppose a martial funeral service might have. Would there be a drum? Would there be? 22:18 Erin: I think so, yeah. Bagpiper and drums, I think, of. For martial funeral. Yeah. 22:23 Wes: And she talks about boots of lead. 22:24 Erin: Right, so, exactly. Yeah. That's. I was afraid to go all the way to the Civil War, but I kind of was thinking that a little bit. You know, one of my professors was, like, very offended with the idea that she didn't write about the Civil War. She was indifferent to what was going on, you know, So I was primed to read it this way. 22:43 Wes: Well, I think she wrote a poem where she compares dying soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War to heaps of moan. I mean, it's not direct. I think she's in. As indirect in that poem as she is in all her poems, but. 22:55 Erin: Right. 22:56 Wes: But this heaps of moan is. Yeah, yeah, is great. 23:00 Erin: Yeah. So the mind is going numb, which is, you know, again, it's a little bit. There's a mind versus the operation of this poem. The poem itself is sort of like a supermind. You know, again, I'm just interested in this disembodiment or tweezing out of several people within the self. I like homunculi as your. As the mourners. 23:22 Wes: Well, yeah, as you pointed out before, brain becomes mind. And so the thing that's going on in her brain is what's going on in her mind. And that. Just the numbness. That last sentence of the second stanza, last line, I guess it could reverse or reinforce the last line of the first stanza. So sense was breaking through. Mind was going numb. So we gave a variety of readings for that last line in the first stanza. Sense as in reason or, you know, madness or sensory experience. And here numbness, I guess, is oblique to all of that. Numbness would be a failure to experience. And I. I think it would be different from madness or different from sense in the sense of, you know, getting it together. Right. 24:11 Erin: And we would think it would be a kind of relief. Instead, it seems like. Yeah. That the unwanted result of sensory overload that the. The beating has in the previous line. And we'll talk more. I think, you know, this. This idea of numbness will be important when we talk about 372. 24:29 Wes: Right. 24:29 Erin: So, yeah. You know, and also what you said about the. About the sentence or the line. Right. This whole. There's so much suspension going on here. I just want to talk, you know, formally for a second, because the next stanza begins with. And lots of lines begin with. And in the poem because it's, in fact, just one sentence. There's so much suspension. It's all kind of happening in this one kind of unfolding. And it's arguably not even a sentence. Right. It ends with the EM dash. So it's not really complete, as many of her poems do. There's just an unbroken progression happening here. So then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again. Then space began to toll. So we have this idea that the. And I looked this up. Bells can have lead clappers. They don't usually, but they can have lead clappers. So I started to think of this idea of the bell, you know, space began to toll. Right. So that all of space is contained within the frame of the bell. So that's kind of a great image of a head, if that's what she's talking about. Right. Like if the whole thing is taking place within the space of her cranium, to use another corporeal term, then the boots inside are like the lead clapper that's causing the space, the vacuum there to toll. 25:51 Wes: Yeah, that's great. Right. The space, you know, now we're really far away from the brain in the sense of the. You know, the meaty thing inside the cranium. Now we have, you know, we went to mind. And now we're to space on your reading. Right. So space and. And we get this overlapping or coincidence between the cosmos. You know, space in the sense of the cosmos read. It would become the heavens. In the next stanza, or being in her own mind, those two things come together. And of course, it's a nice paradoxical image as well. Right. The idea that space itself could make a sound instead of just being the medium in which sound propagates, that something could be produced by emptiness. Right. And the bell is, of course, a funereal bell. It's a bell that's tolling for someone who's died or for what is lost. And I suppose for what it is that she's lost and represents her sense of loss. 26:52 Erin: Yeah, that's right. I think there's another. There's a third. If we think of space and air as being one kind of element in the stanza. And then the lead, the metallic another, you know, there's a third which is, you know, the elemental parallel doesn't quite work. Of box and creak. I'm thinking of wood. Right. So, like, the further complication of this is that it all must be taking place inside a church with a wooden floor. This isn't like they've gone out into the churchyard because they're not creaking on. You can't creak on earth. And the box too. Right. This isn't even a coffin. It's just a plain box. Plain wooden box. 27:29 Wes: Right. 27:30 Erin: Emphasizes that wooden quality is all. Yeah. You know, without using the word for 27:34 Wes: a moment, it leaves you confused or not. You don't quite know at first that that is a. Is a casket. Or at least if you're slow enough like me. You don't know immediately that that's a casket. And it's a bit. Right. Just the word. I was going to use the word disrespectful. But. Right. You wouldn't say, yeah, Mom's dead. Let's get a box for her, bury it, put it in the ground. It's a more ordinary and plain way that doesn't sanctify the container in which the person or thing that one or idea that one has lost, that's gonna take them to the beyond. What is the word that I'm looking for? Minimizing or what? 28:15 Erin: I don't know. Maybe you're thinking even of something like sacrilegious, you know, because there's something a little bit. She's not taking it terribly seriously, I think. Yeah. I think maybe disrespectful. Unless you're Faulkner. And then everybody's in it. But mom is always in a box. She's not even in the ground, but, you know, and smells as well. Right. That migraine aura that she creates by 28:40 Wes: her putrefaction, she did it when she was alive. She might as well do it when she's dead. 28:46 Erin: I think it's humility here. Right. Because she could put herself in a box. Maybe she'd put somebody else in a coffin. Right. But her. It's a box, and we don't even know what's in it because she hears them lift a box and creak across her soul. But what's in the box again? Who are the mourners? What's in the box? What's the floor? So there's. It's like a. It's not even really her. It is her, but it's also just a piece of her or something of her. It's her horcrux. I don't know. It's something. 29:12 Wes: If it were a Twilight Zone episode, we'd eventually see Inside the Box and we'd see her in the movie. 29:17 Erin: Right? Right. Well. And in the end, she is in the box. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I think box is indicative of her particular kind of humility and her not taking herself seriously. Because I think it's important at this point that we say that this is kind of. I mean, it's a serious poem, but it's also a really kind of playful poem. You know, there's something really funny I find about this poem. No. 29:40 Wes: Yeah. And it's got a charm to it, but it's playful and charming and not. It's not a poem that makes you feel sad, even though, in a way. And it is about. So I think box is very apt in the sense. It's another image that gets at a resistance to mourning, because that seems to be what's going on in the poem. So to minimize or to. Mourning is turned into madness. Mourning is turning into the beating of a drum, into martial image, in that case. And of course, when you're at war, then I guess it isn't a casket, it's a hastily made pine box that they're putting people into the ground, or if you're lucky, or they're putting soldiers in the mass graves. So in that martial context, the life becomes cheaper. And that may be one of the things that is bothering her. That's the way I'm seeing this, as a resistance to mourning. And that resistance to mourning often has a manic quality. And we all do it all the time. I think I've probably mentioned the Louis CK bit. It's a bit about how people use their devices to avoid having any feelings, especially feelings of sadness. So manic defenses like that are everywhere. Or being outraged by politics, getting into a fighting mood. In other words, into a martial frame of mind, which of course only produces more loss. So it's a nasty cycle to avoid the feeling of loss and then to go into fighting mode and produce more destruction and then go through that again. 31:14 Erin: And you don't think there's anything healthy about the angry response at times. 31:19 Wes: It's funny. I was talking to someone about this the other day. 31:21 Erin: I was too. This is interesting. 31:24 Wes: I have a friend who claims that the paranoid schizoid position, which is a psychoanalytic concept from Melanie, a great psychoanalyst named Melanie Klein, and refers to primitive defense mechanisms that she thinks are there in everyone as infants. And then we mature out of them to some extent, but they get re aroused. And so that includes splitting, where we make people out to be all good or all bad or paranoia and projection and things like that, which you see a lot in political thinking. I think the way people think politically is often quite psychotic and primitive. And it's quite common in people who you otherwise think are very rational. The plank in reason has not broken, except when it comes to politics. 32:13 Erin: Right? Right. 32:14 Wes: It's useful if you are truly in a position where your life is at stake and you need to fight for your life, then you need to be able to demonize the other and be angry or outraged. It helps. Right. You don't want conscience interfering with killing someone if it's kill or be killed. The problem is we read lots of situations that are not existential, as if they were. And we go into kill or be killed mode when it's not actually that mode. And that includes, for instance, in the Holocaust where if you asked the interviewed Nazi soldiers or SS officers who had participated in killing infants and why did you do this? Well, it was us or them. You know, it's not like I wanted to kill babies, but we had to get rid of the Jews or they were going to get rid of us. So people start engaging in these preemptive strikes and they can become to the point of it being genocidal. So that's the problem. You need it. You need a point where outrage is going to motivate you to resist or react. But it can also be crazy making. 33:18 Erin: Right. 33:18 Wes: So I don't know that there's a good way around. There's no solution to that. Right. 33:23 Erin: Yeah. The instance in which this came up for me was far less profound than what you're talking about. But just I have a couple people in my life who are going through sort of breakups of various forms. And it was suggested that perhaps anger is necessary so that you don't attack yourself. It's healthy to be angry toward the other person for a bit. Right? 33:42 Wes: Yeah, it's healthier than self attack. 33:44 Erin: Right. And then you can feel sadness, but there's something like sort of self preservation, something of self preservation in the anger. It was suggested that I was sort of immediately going to sadness and I needed to have a bridge in this conversation that we were talking about where we were all talking about sort of like different. Different ways that we have of coping with certain things like these breakups, be they of, you know, whatever variety. That anger was a healthier place to go to than this. Blaming oneself. 34:15 Wes: Yeah, I think if someone is prone to self attack and self hate. So that's the melancholic avoidance of mourning. You can avoid mourning by getting depressed. So it's a very different thing. According to Freud, being depressed and attacking yourself. Mourning is a process of letting go and getting engaged with memories of what you loved that you've lost. And then kind of reality testing and saying, okay, that's no longer there. And I accept that melancholia or depression, in a way you maintain you're in denial about the loss and you remain unconsciously attached to the thing and refuse to let it go. And you identify with it. So that when you attack yourself, you're attacking the thing that you've lost. You're pretending that you are what you've lost. And the self attack is a complaint against the disappointing thing that you've lost. Right. The thing that's disappointed you by leaving you. So yeah, if you go into therapy in that Mode. The therapist should, to some extent, help you hate other people instead of hating yourself. Help me to help you to hate me? Other people, yes. But at a certain point, yeah. And no. Yeah. You get them to hate you. 35:27 Erin: Yeah. 35:27 Wes: As the analyst, you know, if you kind of get them to be willing to go into a negative. What we call a negative transference. But. But in any case, yeah. But at a certain point, people can use hatred of others or anger at others to avoid responsibility. So beyond that, there's the depressive position, which is not depression, and it's something to be worked through, but it's sort of a forgive and forget mode or some sort of repair and reparation. So you could see the other person as a person and see their flaws and mistakes, the things that they did wrong, and see your own role in it, all that therapy stuff. But at a certain point, yeah, anger. Anger is better. Certainly better than self attack. 36:13 Erin: Right. And we could talk about humor's relationship to this, but I think all of this is actually super important for when we discuss 372. So this is all great, and I think relevant groundwork for that. To go back to the poem. I think of this poem as being somewhere in the halfway point or somewhere on the sliding scale between a poem like Because I Could Not Stop for Death, which we're not covering, but which is very, very fanciful, very allegorical, very funny kind of treatment of the self dying versus, on the other end of the spectrum, something like 372, which is, I think, not really funny at all and not fanciful at all and not. I mean, you can argue there's always a little bit of fancifulness in certain metaphors and similes. They have, you know, an element of the surreal kind of built into them. And certainly in Dickinson, they're so powerful that they are maybe more surreal than most. But I would say this is somewhere on the sliding scale between those two things, you know, because this is. The box is. And the creaking across my soul. I mean, there's something. To me, there's something funny about that image. And so we could argue, you know, anger and maybe humor, too, are kind of these defensive positions against the grief. And I'm reading a little bit of humor as a defense mechanism in this. I could be wrong, but. Right. So. 37:24 Wes: Yeah. And the humor. Humor is a form of manic. What I've called manic defense, which we use. And we all. We all need them. It's a more mature. Yeah. The other manic forms that are less palsy. 37:34 Erin: Okay. Well, yeah, and I think there's something manic, just about the whole, you know, as I think I was kind of hinting at earlier about the whole structure of the poem, the fact that it's one sentence, you know, so the dashes both stop you and propel you forward. Right. So you could argue that the meter, you know, which is. This is a common meter. So ballad stanza 4 3, 4 3. Pretty regular, which is a sort of like, drumbeat in and of itself. But the fact that we're both sort of pausing and moving forward with the dashes kind of complicates this idea of suspension and how quickly or slowly we're moving through the sentence at any given point. But I think it's probably a little too complex for us to talk about on the podcast because of the reliance of notation and the visual in that. But anyway, so let's go on to as all the heavens were a bell. So this is where we've already talked about this space and the sort of emptiness of that as ringing and then being. But an ear, the tree falling in the forest. We're the ones. We're the ones to ensure that it makes a sound or something like that. Being itself is the thing that sort of like, witnesses the space and gives. Or the heavens. And gives the heavens. Bell. A sound. 38:47 Wes: You know, it's interesting because, yeah, the typical opposition is between heaven and earth or solid ground. And here the heavens have become a bell. The space has become something that produces sound and being, which I suppose I'm associating with the earth now with that other side of the opposition, with sort of substantive reality. Right. As opposed to space is the thing doing the listening. Really, really cool, innovative image. Right. And one of the things that makes her great. 39:19 Erin: It is so funny that, you know, being is like the least corporeal of any of the images used here. I mean, I think being is even less corporeal somehow than mind, because mind at least has something to attach to. I mean, I suppose being does. Right? It has a body maybe to attach to, but it's so in the ether here, except for it's an ear. So it becomes corporeal, but it becomes the thing that is itself. Maybe, you know, the helix of the ear and the structure of it maybe is itself a kind of. Gosh, I'm just thinking of this now. Inside out bell. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We both had the idea at the same time. Or you. 40:01 Wes: No, you had thought about this and then you gave it to me. You just gave the idea. I'm Trying to take credit for it, of course, but. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Because I think she's complaining about the idea, right Being butt and ear. It's as if right being is going to crowd her out. Her and silence are some strange race, wrecked and solitary. This goes to the essence of the problem, which is that. So as an ear, right, Being would be something passive rather than active, receptive. Right. It just listens. And what does it listen to? It listens to this space itself producing a sound, or nothingness itself, or heaven itself producing the sound. And maybe there's something of the divine in that. So we might think of the divine as sort of divine substance is sort of crowding out the reality of the individual. Think of someone like Spinoza, right, who makes all of being. God is just substance. And we are but modes of God. We are properties. We are barnacles on the body of God on his vast whale body. 41:14 Erin: I love that. 41:15 Wes: And so our reality, and this is, you know, this is sort of perennial theological problem, is the danger that God's reality, his beingness, is so expansive that we can't be much in comparison to it, or that it'll crowd us out, or that it puts us in too passive a position. So that's what it sounds like when she's comparing to being but an ear. And what is the alternative? I and silence. So she associates herself, herself with silence, which is an interesting. Right. Because that seems kind of empty as well. 41:53 Erin: Right. 41:53 Wes: But this is supposed to be the greater reality. Maybe this is about the silence of solitude and being able to think one's thoughts and being able to comprehend oneself. Right. Being able to be who you are without these other sounds distracting you and confusing you from that identity. 42:13 Erin: You know, one of the readings that, you know, I was almost a little embarrassed to say, but I think maybe you've given me a little confidence. I was almost thinking, because I was trying to think of what's the nothingness that makes a sound. And the thing I thought of was tinnitus because it happened to me. I was getting a ringing in my ears after having not slept and then listening to loud music. I was getting a little bit of temporary tinnitus. That also made me think, and this is maybe related to our martial thing. I don't know if I could get there, but that made me think. In movies, you know, when somebody has a bomb go off near them and then the sound in the movie creates that high pitched, like, squeal, everything gets crowded out and you get this. It's this really Genius way they have in the movie of sort of like reproducing probably the ringing in the ears of the main character that we're supposed to be sympathizing with. And it also gives us this sense of wanting it out, wanting the sound to go away and to feel oneself as whole and know that, you know, that because we're sort of joining in the sympathies of the main character that, like, we've been actually unharmed by the bomb, you know, what that has gone off or something like that. I think of that, and therefore the silence being away from that as making an inherent sense to me, if the whole world is like this bomb going off, which would be related to the Civil War imagery, as I think we're already kind of hinting at, then the silence and being away from those types of things. That threat of the world ringing out with alarm bells or something, you know, would be the desire of the I in the poem, you mentioned the maggots in the. In the first stanza. And I was thinking a little bit, but I didn't have a connection. I was thinking about Death's duel, the John Donne funeral sermon, his last funeral sermon, and talking about the worms going into the body. Right. And so I had been thinking about Death's Duel, but I thought, that's not really relevant. And then here, of course, I see it now. There's. This is not from Death's duel. It's from one of his other meditations. I see the. The no man is an island idea in the desert island image of Silence and the I. I don't know how that's connected, but I'm wondering if the little sort of specter of Dun is going through here. And maybe, I don't know, maybe no man being an island, the I needs a companion, and that companion is silent. Every Robinson Crusoe needs their Friday. I don't know. There's something there. 44:35 Wes: Yeah. That's really interesting. Some strange race. 44:38 Erin: Right. 44:39 Wes: She and Silence, who. Yeah. Are an odd couple. 44:44 Erin: Right. 44:45 Wes: Is Silence even a person? It's an odd couple. They live in an apartment together. One of them is messy, one of them just doesn't do anything. Silence is always complaining to her about everything. No. 44:59 Erin: Anyway, Silence is so Tony Randall. Yeah. 45:03 Wes: Yeah. So they're castaways in. In an alien world, which will become relevant because she's going to talk about dropping through worlds. It's as if this reality is one alien to her. She's a stranger in a strange land. She's been shipwrecked in this plane of Existence and belongs somewhere else. And what is the complaint about? It seems to be that the bells that toll the morning funereal bells are. Well, let her alone. And she wants to be with silence, but they keep making noise. So it may be that there's an element of mourning wrapped up with being that's inescapable. Which again would. Would speak to something about the divine, as in the corporeal absence of the divine. Right. The fact that the divine is non empirical, that we don't have ready access to it. Right. God's absence or God's invisibility is a loss. 46:02 Erin: So for me, because I was trying to understand how then in the last sentence, the I is finally merged with the body. It's finally in the box. And I wondered if it was something, you know, which you're helping me understand. I wondered if it was something about the solitude of the previous stanza that then allows her to get into the box at last to kind of merge with it, the death finally kind of happening. And maybe that's related to this idea of being sort of abandoned by the divine. Perhaps that's the final. I don't know, the last straw that then breaks the plank in reason. 46:36 Wes: Yeah. I mean, you might associate mourning and faith though, right. Faith has to overcome the absence of a physically available other. It has to do that by giving up that demand, which is a kind of mourning. I'm just thinking out loud and speculating. Obviously. I don't know if this is great reading or not, but the question is, regardless of how you read it. Yeah. That. This is the question. What is it that's bothering her? What's wrong with Emily? 47:04 Erin: It's eating Emily. 47:06 Wes: Worms Emily. Yeah. Okay. So in the end the plank of reason breaks or a plank in reason breaks and she drops down. So she succumbs to the madness, which I guess she's in some sense been resisting and dropping down into another world. There's a little bit of hint of there of Hades or something. Except for her it's multiple worlds, it seems like. Right. Inherent world at every plunge. 47:32 Erin: Yeah. 47:33 Wes: Multi dimensional. Emily Dickinson, before that sort of science fiction was in vogue. 47:38 Erin: She has a cosmic consciousness, I gotta 47:41 Wes: say, and it ends with finishing knowing. So we get. We get an association between the failure of reason and the failure of knowing. Although potentially not knowing is a positive thing. Right. It's knowledge is what gets us into trouble in several senses. Right. There's knowledge of the tree of good and evil, but there's knowingness, there's the knowing itself has kind of A manic pretense to it. By knowing things, we comprehend the world. Right. And it's much more plausible for human beings. Potential omniscience. Right. Through science and other means is something that almost feels reasonable to that. It's not that we're ever going to be God and be able to control the universe. Right. But we might know the universe. We might know the entire universe. So knowledge is quite a power to be available to human beings. It can make us arrogant, it can make us think. We know things that we don't know, get us into all sorts of trouble. So finishing knowing, giving up on knowing is quite a good thing on one reading. So maybe this is what she needs. 48:44 Erin: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was thinking finished could mean ended or completed. I finished my studies. 48:51 Wes: Well, no, I think that actually, I think that's better. 48:55 Erin: Well, I think, you know, plausible way to read. It's exactly the way you're reading it, which is, you know, maybe. Maybe the idea of giving up on knowing is some somehow inherent to the idea of I completed this course of study and now that's it. 49:08 Wes: You'd finish knowing. Yeah. Can mean knowing everything or stopped that project of knowing. And maybe you stopped the project of knowing because you now know everything or maybe you just found out that it's no longer relevant. 49:22 Erin: But I love this idea that it's just a plank that she falls through while reason is the perfectly constructed or not so perfectly constructed because it can break. Right. Delicately constructed, but fragile, I should say deck or something that you. I've fallen through a plank in a deck before onto ground that was just pitched. It was not like big fall or anything. 49:47 Wes: Oh, really? 49:47 Erin: It's. Yeah, it's dark under there. It's scary. And there are lots of critters. Yeah. 49:55 Wes: So, well, how does a gallows work? 49:57 Erin: Aha. Oh, you're smart. I never thought of that. Exactly. Right. Because the. That's so. Right, because. Yeah. There's usually a trap door. 50:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it just occurred to me. So it seems like one possibility why I hired you. 50:11 Erin: Yeah. That's such a good idea. 50:16 Wes: You know, I was just thinking. Yeah. The suddenness, as if someone is now receiving their death sentence. 50:21 Erin: Yeah. So there are trap doors. There's also, you know, the standing on the chair and having it kicked out from under you. There's. Yeah, right. Right. 50:28 Wes: And then at every plunge. Right. So it. But she. So this dropping down and down becomes multiple drops. And it's as if she's going through multiple floors, you know, multiple. So each new plunge. She breaks through to something new. And this is where I imagine Rick and Morty or some other cartoon, a multi dimensional thing where she's in one world and everyone's John Malkovich in that world, and then she's in another world and everyone's pink and she's another world. And she does that, flicks through multiple worlds indefinitely until she has known every possible world, she's seen all possibilities, maybe. And then she's done. It's like your life flashing before your eyes, but it's like the entire universe and all possible universes flashing in front of your eyes. 51:22 Erin: I love that. It's amazing. Okay, so I think we'll finish talking about I Felt a Funeral in My Brain in part two. We're going to talk about a good companion poem to this one, which we've already referenced a few times in this part, which is number 372. After great pain a formal feeling comes. So we'll talk about that in part two. Thanks Wes, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winter’s legacy lies a rot, and just what that rot represents in the film—be it the oppressions of vitality and ambition, the wages of class mobility, the unruly desires of sexuality, or the latent evidence of civilizational decline—is our subject today. Wes & Erin discuss the 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Upcoming Episodes: Emily Dickinson, Rosemary’s Baby. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca. We just got done talking about, but I think are going to continue talking about Mrs. Danvers relationship to Rebecca and specifically maybe how she's facilitated her affairs with Favell, possibly others. Just thinking about the fact that Favell calls her Dany and the fact that George Sanders has, you know, he sort of like famously had his own kinds of sexually ambiguous qualities. We did another movie with him, right? 1:04 Wes: He's a bit of a metrosexual. 1:05 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In All About Eve, he's yeah. He's seen as maybe being gay. Right. So I think there's ambiguous sexuality on the part of both Danny Danvers and George Sanders character Favell. So the fact that they're in this triad with Rebecca kind of complicates that. 1:25 Wes: Yeah. So there's a certain point where she eavesdrops on Mrs. Danvers, telling Jack not to come again. So Danvers says, I don't think it's wise for you to come here, Mr. Jack. And eventually he says, yes, we must. Well, he says, it's just like coming back home. She says, quiet it. He says, yes, we must be careful not to shock Cinderella. Goodbye, Mr. Jack, and be careful. Right. So there's indications that even though she's resisting him coming around, it's not because she has any sympathy for Joan Fontaine's character or is interested in the ethical aspect of it. It's more of a practical interest in helping him stay covert. What's that? And then, of course, he goes to the window. 2:13 Erin: Yeah, yeah, he. 2:14 Wes: And flirts with Joan Fontaine's character. Yeah. 2:17 Erin: So sort of. Sort of. 2:19 Wes: Should we call her Mrs. De Winter now? She. Is it okay to. Is it mdw. It's just too formal for her. It's too. 2:28 Erin: I know, yeah. 2:30 Wes: But anyway, so, yeah, he goes and makes references, you know, to like, Max leaving his little bride all alone. Isn't he afraid someone's going to come down and carry you off? So quite a sinister. Or it's like the wolf showing up and, you know, with drooling and. 2:47 Erin: Yeah. I take the stepping through the window to be quite a violation. He's violating a boundary. Breaking and entering, sort of. Yeah. The fact that Mrs. Danvers facilitates this relationship to like, you know, this is another indication that she puts the sort of like, vitality that Rebecca represents over and above any sort of allegiance that we might associate with her position to the reputation of the house, you know, protecting the actual master of the house and of the sort of like, ancestral line there that it represents. So again, it's as though Rebecca is this super aristocrat. Like, she's. By temperament, she is more worthy of being aristocratic than Maxim himself, even though she is not a blue blood. And so Mrs. Danvers serving her and facilitating this affair with Favell, who was a used car salesman, let's not forget, 3:42 Wes: it turns out, yeah, he's a very aristocratic seeming car salesman. 3:50 Erin: England is full of them. I guess. It's hysterical. 3:55 Wes: One must do what one can get by in these times when all the old money is dried up. 4:03 Erin: Yeah, it's such a strange thing. I had forgotten about that when I rewatched this. I was like, he's a huge star 4:10 Wes: salesman to find that out. Yeah, yeah. I see Rebecca, despite her aristocratic vitality, let's say, and polish and beauty, as introducing a bit of perversity into the house. And then Danvers seems to want to facilitate that. Right. To help facilitate it in some way, even though here she's rebuffing Jack a little bit. And then later on he'll, you know, she'll come in and he'll say, you know, Dany, all your precautions were in vain. The mistress of the house was hiding behind the door. What about presenting me to the bride? We get the sense that. I don't know, my general sense from the entire context of the movie is that she's kind of been a facilitator of this affair and that, in a way, she's in cahoots with Favell, and her principal interest is not in serving Maxim or his interests, but in sort of being a conduit for the introduction of this. Something very different into the house, something that undermines it. Something that maybe. And maybe. And maybe you suggested this before, but perhaps Rebecca is more truly aristocratic in spirit or something. 5:26 Erin: Yes. 5:27 Wes: That's what she's bringing in, so to speak, into the house to kind of, you know, you could say, liven it up, even though it's very destructive. And you can see why Danvers, who is lacking in vitality, would be in search of what she thinks is vitality, although in this case, it's a vitality that's too indiscriminate and destructive. Right. It's not a stable vitality. It's sort of a whirlwind that's going to lead to bad things. 5:55 Erin: You're right. It's the sea itself. Right. So she wrestles with the sea. Right. And it takes her over. This is Mrs. Danvers obsession with the sea. This is why Mrs. Danvers ultimately burns down the house. I think she is disenchanted. She becomes disenchanted with Rebecca as a symbol of vitality once she discovers that Rebecca was not teeming with further life, but in fact with cancer. And what that represents. Right. The loss of vitality that that represents. I'm interested. I love. 6:25 Wes: Interesting. Okay, I didn't see that. Yeah. 6:27 Erin: The great essay by Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, has quite a bit to say about the cultural associations with cancer on the one hand and tuberculosis on the other. So the idea that tuberculosis in the cultural consciousness is something which is the result of too much vitality, you know, which burns you up, which eats you up, you know, it wastes you. Versus the ideas of cancer as being this idea of not expressing too much. You know, the idea, I think the pathology of cancer was something that you got from underusing not expressing enough vitality with sort of like keeping up stores in reserve, which then kind of rotted inside you. So you then end up becoming. Not wasting yourself away, but of sort of becoming pregnant with your own lack of vitality. Right. Expanding that the tumor is the thing that expands inside you. 7:22 Wes: Right. And you can see the analog to having a baby. 7:26 Erin: Right, Right, right. It's the twist on the baby. Exactly the way that Rebecca is using Rebecca, the film is using this twist. So the last thing we would expect would be for someone like Rebecca to have a metaphoric ailment like a tumor. You know, it's the last thing that she expected. She expected to be pregnant, which is why she was going to this doctor who is sort of implied to be an abortionist. Right. So she thinks that she's pregnant. She obviously is in some way aware of a foreign body inside her. Right. That she would go to an abortionist to get this done. 8:04 Wes: Right. 8:05 Erin: And it turns out to be a tumor rather than a baby. So rather than moral life, it is a tumor. And this seems to be the thing that breaks Mrs. Danvers because she's surprised that Rebecca did not tell her about a pregnancy, but she seems okay. And then when she discovers that it's cancer, that's when she burns the house down. Her symbol of vitality has the sort of like anti vitality symbol in her center. So something about what Mrs. Danvers has been serving has been a lie. And she has to sort of self immolate to escape that realization, Burn it all down because it was somehow rotten to the core. And maybe because then she realizes that what she was facilitating in terms of perpetuating this vitality was in fact itself a kind of rottenness. Right. A kind of perversion. 8:50 Wes: Wow. Really interesting. Yeah. I mean, it does give you a good contrast between the type of vitality which is uncontained and destructive, like potentially the ocean or cancer. Right. Because cancer is just particular cells have become immortal and disregard the boundaries of other organs in the body and will just continue to grow and grow and grow. And you can keep cancer cells alive in a petri dish forever. Right. They will just continue to divide. They don't. They don't undergo apoptosis, they don't kill themselves the way A normal cell would. And so unconstrained vitality is destructive if you need it to work and play its part within a larger structure, within a larger stable structure, including a real relationship to someone. Her vitality, that's why I call her party Girl, presumably involved numerous relationships with different men and having, overall, in general, having a good time. And she certainly wasn't interested in the marriage and even made that clear. I'm just using you and you're stuck with me, but. Right, so if it had been a baby, it would have been more representative of the stable and renewing form of vitality as opposed to the destructive form. So what you said. Yeah. Makes me think that Danvers had a kind of insight at the end into her confusion between one sort of vitality and the other. What she thought she loved in Rebecca or idealized in Rebecca, turned out to be something essentially destructive or self destructive. And for someone like Danvers, who's probably already pretty depressed, it's like, oh, I thought I had found a way out. I thought I'd found a solution, but it's just more of this, it's more of my bullshit, you know, or my self destructive. 10:46 Erin: And yeah, yeah, the realization that that represents for Mrs. Danvers and the fact that, you know, Rebecca didn't die sort of heroically struggling with the sea and then being, you know, reabsorbed into the wild forces from which she came, but with this cancer, I think, actually kind of disguises what is the true, for me, what is the true heroism of Rebecca in that moment. You know, one of the things that Sontag talks about in that essay is the shame associated with cancer societally. And one of the reasons why she wrote this essay when she did in the late 70s, I believe, was because she herself had cancer and was receiving her test results and updates from the doctor by mail in unmarked brown envelopes. Because the idea is that even, and this is in the late 70s, you know, that cancer was such a shameful thing, such an unspoken thing. It was a assumed that the person afflicted with it was keeping it a secret from everybody around them. And in fact, more often than not, what you would have when it was inoperable, when it was progressed enough that there was no hope, what often happened was that the cancer was kept from the person with the cancer himself or herself. This was something that the family knew, and they would deliberately keep the person afflicted with it in the dark so that they could not be. So that they would not be tortured by the knowledge that they had this Rapidly arriving expiration date, you know, in ways that we just can't appreciate now. In 1940, there were so many cultural stigmas surrounding cancer. And the fact that Rebecca kind of inverts that relationship, like, keeps it, she's the one who knows that she has it and she doesn't tell anybody else, is the opposite of what would normally happen if she were going to a family doctor that Maxim, say, was also going to, this almost definitely would have happened, which is that Maxim would be informed of what she has and everybody else around her would know, but she 12:48 Wes: would not know unless she walked in on the celebration. 12:51 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Right. Why is there this, like, ugly looking thing? 12:56 Wes: What's the champagne for? It's not because you have cancer. 13:02 Erin: Oh, okay then. Good. 13:03 Wes: Oops. 13:07 Erin: Right. But you know what I mean? Like her ability to face this head on. And I mean, she does this in a. She then does this by goading Maxim into killing her. Right. But there's a strange. I mean, there's a reading of this film in which she, as a kind of Byronic anti hero, is actually like this sort of triumphant main character. I think that there are things about Rebecca that are tremendously attractive for me anyway. You know, she's this great, amazing force that maybe I'm just like a Mrs. Danvers, but I can't help but admire it. Right. And so I think in death she actually, or in the confrontation with this cancer, she actually, in a strange sort of way, like, proves her mettle. Even if Mrs. Danvers can't appreciate that or sees it as a betrayal, sees this thing, which, you know, of course you can't control as being a betrayal of her vitality, I think she kind of actually proves a sort of heroine in this confrontation. And it's just unfortunate that Mrs. Danvers can't see that. 14:03 Wes: Well, let's look at Mrs. Danvers understanding of her death. And this is at the point where Mrs. Danvers has tricked Joan Fontaine's character into wearing a dress and a costume for the ball that make her look just like a portrait of Rebecca. 14:21 Erin: No, a portrait of an ancestor of Maxims. Rebecca is. 14:26 Wes: Okay, So I think thought I understood that to be an ancestor. Yeah. Danvers is saying that was an ancestor of Maxims and then it turning out to be Rebecca. That's why everyone was upset. 14:35 Erin: No, it turns out to be Rebecca did this exact thing at a costume party. 14:40 Wes: Ah, okay. Yes, I see. 14:42 Erin: Wore the same outfit. 14:43 Wes: I get it. Okay, Right. So that leads Joan Fontaine's character to get upset and go up to. To go Upstairs. And ultimately, in the end, we get Danvers following her. And at a certain point, Joan Fontaine's character says to Mrs. Danvers, why do you hate me? What have I done that you should ever hate me? So Danvers says, you tried to take her place. You let him marry you. I've seen his face, his eyes. They're the same as those first weeks after she died. I used to listen to him walking up and down, up and down, all night long, night after night, thinking of her suffering torture because he'd lost her. I don't want to know. And she says, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Danvers, you thought you could be Mrs. De Winter, live in her house, walk in her steps, take the things that were hers, but she's too strong for you. You can't fight her. No one ever got the better of her. Never ever. So never, never. She was beaten in the end, but it wasn't a man, it wasn't a woman, it was the sea. So it's important to Mrs. Danvers that. That it was the natural elements that ended up defeating Rebecca, and in a way, something that was, you know, that Rebecca embodied, I guess, the sea, but that it not be another person that defeated her, and I guess defeated her in the sense of replacing her. Replacing her in the affections of Maxim in particular. So when she finds out, out that Rebecca actually had cancer, I mean, you can view that as just another natural cause. Right. At least it's not a person. But it is also Rebecca's own body. It's something internal to her, as you pointed out, maybe something that could be something one could be ashamed of, and certainly not something that is representative, like the sea of vitality or something like that. Although, you know, as we've said, you could see it as representative of a particular kind of vitality in the boundlessness of the cancer cell. 16:45 Erin: I like that. I think you can also see it maybe as Joan Fontaine. You know, the cancer is Joan Fontaine coming. Invading. Right. Invading the space. If we think of the house itself as the body of Rebecca, if you will. Right. Like Joan Fontaine is the interloper, is the foreign body that comes in and causes some problems. Right. So. So you could say that, you know, the idea of Joan Fontaine, the idea of a second marriage that might reverse or somehow defeat the first, is Joan Fontaine as well. And we can argue, of course, that Rebecca has created the conditions in which she's going to have to be replaced by somebody else in Maxim's Affections, in the House, if we want to see Joan Fontaine as something like an inevitability, she's also, I think, or the cancer, rather, is also. It's arguably also Maxim, or what Maxim represents, or the idea that her kind of vitality and this aristocracy can't actually cohabitate properly. You know, we should talk a bit about Maxim himself. I mean, I don't want to let him get off scot free because I think that he is the sort of the villain that the film isn't really examining too closely, but which maybe knows, maybe the film knows he is the villain. His passivity. What in him was attracted to Rebecca in the first place? I mean, in a way, Rebecca did nothing wrong. Right. She got this man to marry her because of she. Okay, I mean, I'm going too far there, perhaps by suggesting that she did nothing wrong, she obviously tricked him into thinking that she was in love with him. But insofar as she expressed qualities which he found attractive, we can argue that she didn't do much more wrong than most any other woman in her situation, marrying someone like Maxim. Right. She wanted to make herself desirable to a wealthy, powerful man. So what in Maxim was attracted to her, and then what in Maxim has been destroyed by her? Or his. Or rather were his inadequacies simply revealed by her? You know, what in him then needs to take a child, you know, an emotional and sort of, in terms of maturity, a child who he then can dominate in the way that he has been seemingly dominated by Rebecca. The fact that he seems to have no problem exporting responsibility to the likes of Rebecca, to Mrs. Danvers. All of these things, I think, really, really complicate him as a figure and make us wonder, like what. What happened in the first place that this marriage went on. There's something that he wasn't getting, that he wasn't seeing at the very beginning that allowed the marriage to happen. And that. That reads to me as the kind of willful blindness of someone who's not properly tending himself and his position and his estate. Right. Like he's the one who's let in the sea. It's like he's opened all the doors and windows in a hurricane, and then he gets upset that his house is trashed. Right. You know, so I just want to kind of turn the spotlight there. Yeah. 19:44 Wes: He certainly was not cautious enough. And he's not cautious enough when he brings home the Joan Fontaine character. I mean, it's pretty reckless. 19:53 Erin: Yeah. 19:54 Wes: He subjects her to this marrying a random person. And you get the sense he probably, when he married Rebecca. He was marrying a random person. Attractive, but random. 20:04 Erin: Well, random in what way? I mean, who would fulfill those childlike conditions such that the choice is random? You know what I mean? He seems to need. 20:12 Wes: I think maybe they should gone out on more dates first. Or he should have gotten to know her. 20:17 Erin: Right? Right. 20:19 Wes: Well, he doesn't really know the Joan Fontaine character. 20:22 Erin: Well, what's there to know? To a certain extent, Right. 20:24 Wes: They've known each other a few days when he proposed. 20:26 Erin: Right. I mean, what's there to know? To a certain extent, the whole point is that she's unformed, that she's not. Right. She's not some sort of complex personality. 20:34 Wes: Well, you never know. She could be another con artist. I mean, he got conned once. You'd think he'd be more careful. And I don't know how old Rebecca was when he married her. But what you're calling a child may just be of marriageable age. There's that scene right, where she says, I wish I were a woman of 36. Of 36? Is that the age dressed in black satin with a string of pearls, which I don't quite understand. You're gonna have to explain that to me in a second. But then he says, please promise me never to wear black satin or pearls or to be 36 years old, as if that's old. It's pretty hilarious. 21:12 Erin: Well, yes. 21:15 Wes: And, yeah, not the best thing to say under any circumstance to a woman, but, yeah. So what is this. What is this idea of being a woman dressed in black satin? 21:27 Erin: I think there are undertones of Anna Karenina in that. For me, 36 seems to represent the sort of the height of sexual maturity and sophistication in a woman, that number. I don't know why that number was chosen by either Daphne du Maurier or the script writers, but to me, it is the number I associate with the kind of like full. The full shedding of the look of a young person, a young woman. But not the look of someone who's now aging. Right. Like you're most fully yourself, maybe between something like the ages of 34 and 38, where you're in that phase in which you no longer look like a girl and you don't look like a woman who has lost her looks and who is starting to age. I'm air quoting heavily. Losing one's looks. Right. So it's a sort of like eternal peak. Womanhood. 36, to me. 22:28 Wes: Yeah, this makes sense. 22:29 Erin: And the black satin and the pearls would represent what that means. A Woman at the full height of her sophistication, her desirability, her perhaps something like her cunning. All of these things which have, I think, positive valences for the most part, but which have become fraught in light of Rebecca's life or which could be fraught under the right circumstances. But, you know. But I wanna. You know, and I'm pushing. I'm trying to push against the simple reading of the film with Rebecca as the villain and Maxim as her victim, simply because it's interesting to play with that a bit. I'm not taking this totally seriously, but one can argue that Maxim is doing to Joan Fontaine what Rebecca has done to her. That if Rebecca is the Mrs. Robinson character, you know, he's simply like repeating this cycle, right? He's. He's created conditions in which learning the truth about his marriage, his first marriage, is the only thing that can actually induce real emotional intimacy in his current marriage. And yet he's withholding that. He's withholding the possibility of them being real equals and of them having real emotional intimacy. And then the minute that it is deployed, this information and real intimacy is affected between the two of them. He has injected Joan Fontaine with Rebecca, with a piece of Rebecca, with this story. He's inoculated her from Rebecca in a way, but only by making her a little bit more like Rebecca. And this is something, in fact, that Joan Fontaine has to do, right? She has to be able to stand up for herself. She has to be able to inhabit a more Rebecca like kind of mentality toward the world in order to survive in the aristocratic world of Maxim, right? She can't be a little girl forever. She can't let everybody run roughshod over her forever. She has to ingest a little bit of whatever it is that Rebecca had. But that means becoming more like her. And Maxim is the one who does this. Maxim is the one who sort of taints her, who destroys her illusion. 24:36 Wes: Well, he's rough with her. Yeah. And this destroying of illusions, this is what, you know, one instance of this happens before she makes that wish. So they were driving and she is enjoying herself and says, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory, that bottled up memory like perfume, or the memory like perfume. And it never faded, never got stale. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and live the memory all over it again. This is reminiscent of something she said earlier on, this idea of sticking something you should stick to what is perfect if you find it some very youthful, idealistic things to Say. And then he asks her, what particular moment would you want to keep? All of them. All these last few days, I feel as though I'd collected a whole shelf full of bottles. He says, sometimes, you know, those little bottles contain demons that have a way of popping out at you just as you're trying most desperately to forget. And then she looks dispirited, and then he says, stop biting your nails. So he's very careless. I mean, overall, you get a sense he's an impulsive guy, quickly marrying women that I think he doesn't know well enough to marry. He has anger management issues, as we'll find out. And then he's careless and rough. This is not the only time. Time that he's really kind of callous and careless with her. So I don't know how. She's 23 in this movie, right? 26:04 Erin: I don't know. I never heard. 26:05 Wes: How old is he? How old are they supposed to be? She's supposed to be in her early 20s, and he's supposed to be. 26:10 Erin: Yeah, like 21. And he's maybe pushing 40. 26:13 Wes: Okay. Yeah. So he's with a younger woman, and, you know, he calls her a child at a certain point. Oh, you've got to be careful with children. But he's not careful at all. He's not as careful as he ought to be with anyone of any age, much less with a child. So, I mean, it's a good point. I mean, he's a victim of Rebecca in a way, but obviously there's a reason why he was susceptible to that. 26:37 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And that carelessness, I think, is indicative, too, of this aristocratic quality that he seems to embody. So he's like this aristocracy on the decline that needs the infusion. This is one of the reasons why I brought this up in part one with Mrs. Van Hopper. You know, Rebecca, in a way, represents this sort of, like, American infusion of vitality and not cash, because Maxim doesn't seem to be cash poor. And if he were, he wouldn't be attractive as a mark for Rebecca, but. Right. But she represents something like that infusion of vitality that he needs. But he also, I think, as an aristocrat and as someone who's representative of a fading empire, has gotten into. Into this situation, metaphorically speaking, because of carelessness, because of something having to do with mismanagement and a lack of understanding about the forces with which one is contending. Yeah. So if. If Maxim is something like the British Empire itself, we could see the seeds of empire as being ones in which you know, you are. You're sort of sowing your own destruction by going around unstably, trying to. To acquire things, you know, trying to colonize young women. Exactly, exactly. And I think that that's a position born of a kind of willful blindness and a kind of hubris that Maxim represents. Like he could just go, you know, he trusts himself enough somehow that he could just go out and find someone to marry. And then he's gonna, in fact, he's gonna do it again, right. He lucks out the second time. 28:10 Wes: It's a problem of privilege. He doesn't have to. To do enough for himself. You know, right. When they're talking at the table, like, what is she? What does she do with her time? You know, and then one of the Laceys slips up and says, well, not sailing. It's a good thing. It's not sailing, you know, what does she do? Where doing means, how do you spend all this leisure time? Maxim has someone to manage his estate, right? Crawley. 28:36 Erin: Yes. 28:37 Wes: Who's his friend. So he doesn't even have to manage his. His own estate. 28:41 Erin: That's right. And Mrs. Danvers. 28:42 Wes: Yep, and Mrs. Danvers. So you get a very typical picture of the perils of being the master or the privileged one, which is that you don't get the exercise of having to do things and having to exercise your faculties, physical or mental, and it makes you vulnerable, it makes you obtuse. So this is kind of an inherent fragility in power. And why power? Always, always one of the reasons power tends to overreach. The more power you have, the more mediated your relationship is to reality, let's say, and you become susceptible to all kinds of deception, not just to Rebecca's in the literal sense, but to drinking your own Kool Aid, so to speak, fully investing in a set of ideals that maybe one doesn't even live by. For instance, if you could, you know, if you. This is. Then this is a point, really, I'm making Orwell's point, which is that if you could have absolute power and you could always understand your interest in it in the most cynical and self transparent of ways, as an interest in power, then you might have the flexibility to combat challenges, all challenges to power, and to maintain it, right? To create a stable authoritarian regime, so to speak. Speak. But to the extent that you have to rationalize power and say, well, what I'm doing is actually for the good of all, if I'm colonizing a country, it's for this, that and the other reason. It's not for Just for power and greed and gain. Then you can see why you need to do that psychologically. But you make yourself vulnerable because you're engaged in a kind of self deception. And that self deception becomes the leverage for other people to take you down. In any case, this becomes a basis for Orwell's idea of doublethink, where one, the two strands in doublethink are. Because this is what would be required to maintain power to both. Two, there are reasons why we need to think of what we're doing as good, so that's not actually dispensable. So one needs to be able to rationalize and make up stories about the terrible things one is doing. But also one needs to, to ideally also understand what one's. The real motivations for what one is doing, the real power motivations. So those are the two horns of double think of thinking a contradiction. I think what I'm doing is for the good, and I understand what I'm doing is for power. And that is the only way to sustain a fully authoritarian regime, or fully authoritarian, or totalitarian would be a better word, totalitarian mindset. It's impossible in practice, and that's what. Why totalitarian regimes are so unstable, according to Orwell. But anyway, similarly, any sort of privilege is fragile in the same way. So I think this kind of thing. Yeah, you can see the story as a way in which this kind of thing might play out with a somewhat oblivious aristocratic guy. I don't think it's reading anything into the story to say he's made to look a little bit obtuse in the upper class, you know, privileged Englishman, manner of obtuse, but. Mm. 31:53 Erin: Well, you're making me think of the fact that in Crawley and Mrs. Danvers, he. So he has these proxies and he is also someone who is represented within the film in addition to this sort of like. Like spiritual representation that maybe Crawley provides. You know, we see his photograph on Rebecca's Vanity. We see images of. Of him and of Joan Fontaine in their honeymoon footage. You know, someone pointed out to me, a friend of mine pointed out to me that, like, you know, for a guy who likes to, you know, take video of things and photographs. We don't have any photographs of Rebecca. You know, it's strange that, like, she's right, she maintains this sort of unrepresented quality and, you know, it seems right to me then, based on what you're saying, that maybe Rebecca represents something like this sort of impossible ideal of power, which is, by its impossibility, unrepresentable. And unrepresented in the film, whereas Maxim has all these representations of himself. Right. The other thing I'm thinking about with that is that what Rebecca reminds me of, in addition to being kind of a satanic force, you know, in that, like, she represents the sort of the Byronic anti hero that is best expressed as the, you know, Miltonian Satan of Paradise Lost. She's also like Eve in a way. She's like a perfect. You know, one of the reasons why she might not be represented is, is that she's literally larger than life. There's this idea in Milton and elsewhere, of course, that Adam and eve are like 7ft tall. They're like these, you know, the way he describes them, they're like Scandinavian supermodels. You know, they're like 7ft tall and she has this, like, incredibly long hair. 33:33 Wes: She's in wnba. 33:35 Erin: Right, right. And one of the reasons why that is, it seems, is because of this idea that, you know, that probably goes back to Plato, that the representations that God makes, the pure form, are superior to any representation that we make. So Adam and Eve are pure creations of God, whereas we're the result of human reproduction. You know, we're the sort of like worn out stock that just is, you know, the stamp that then loses its ink after a while. Right. So we're the result of human creation and reproduction. And Adam and Eve were God's sort of like original human, human productions. And so something about that seems to lie at the heart of why Rebecca can't be represented. She's like Eve. She's like this, you know, seven foot tall titan of woman who is bigger than everybody and better than everybody. And we're all just sort of like living in her shadow. We're all just like, you know, the imperfect stamps of her and her hand, you know, this godlike hand is stamped on everything within the house. 34:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that one could say this might be an aspect of every form of idealization, which is that it has the significance of a creative, formative force that lies behind us. Right. So most obvious one is a parental force. So that when we idealize a Rebecca, or when we idealize ourselves, or when we have any sort of aspiration, like a value, a potential occupation, this has something to do with an idealization of a parent or parental interest or social interest, cultural interest, something that stands above us and has shaped us as who we are, or God, a creator force. So I like this idea that she stands in that position and in some sense, I Think it fits psychologically. So what have we missed as we are approaching the end? 35:34 Erin: Maybe just a quick reference to Maxim's sister and her husband, who to me are Austen characters. You know, they're like, they fit the mold of so many Jane Austen characters. Like, say, the older couple in Sense and Sensibility, you know, which makes sense since Manderley and Pemberley are kind of rhyming with each other. The English aristocrat, sweet, harmless version of aristocracy, which is totally unlike the sort of like self destructive relationship of Maxim and Bet. Maybe they provide a kind of a model for what Maxim and Joan Fontaine might end up becoming. 36:10 Wes: You're talking about the Laceys? 36:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. In terms of the universe of the film, Maxim and Rebecca survive. I mean, sorry, Maxim and the second Mrs. De Winter survive as a couple. In the book, they don't. In the book, they never have a real relationship. It's impossible. In the book, of course, he's killed Rebecca and I suppose everybody knows. Again, I'm getting the secondhand, but everybody knows that he has done so, even though he is acquitted in the trial. So his reputation is effectively ruined. And they have to keep kind of traveling around to Monte Carlo and various other places to sort of outrun his reputation, which has been destroyed, like his estate. 36:49 Wes: That's kind of cool. 36:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the marriage never works. 36:53 Wes: I like that fantasy of being on the run. Not from the police or from a killer, but just from one's bad reputation. 37:00 Erin: Yeah, from, from. 37:02 Wes: And just going and to resorts, you know, oh, I'm on the run, I gotta go to the next resort. 37:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So, so the marriage never. The marriage does not work in the book. It can never work. And one can see kind of why that is. It seems improbable that they could live happily ever after under these conditions, but they, they, they try to sell it in the scene and in front of the fireplace where they have, you know, her growing up, but them somehow sort of being okay with that, even though she wasn't allowed to grow up. The terms of the marriage change in that scene, I think. 37:35 Wes: Right, okay. All right, well, thank you, thank you, 37:41 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext.