Imaginary Worlds - Giving Imaginary Advice

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

If you’ve ever searched for my podcast, you probably came across a show with a similar title: Imaginary Advice. I quickly became a fan of Imaginary Advice because the host Ross Sutherland walks the line between fiction and reality, often playing a fictional version of himself doing slightly fantastical things. I talked with Ross about his creative process, and we hear an edited selection of his mini-series Ten Thousand Years, where he and writer Lenni Sanders imagine what if the happy ending from Groundhog Day had not been a game changer for Billy Murray’s character Phil Connors. What if it was just another day, and the days piled up for thousands of years? The episodes of Imaginary Advice we discussed are: https://soundcloud.com/ross-sutherland/45-seinfeld https://soundcloud.com/ross-sutherland/63-tony-gang-flame-war-5th-birthday-episode https://soundcloud.com/ross-sutherland/52-the-man-who-saw-tomorrow-4th-birthday-episode https://soundcloud.com/ross-sutherland/70-sex-and-the-city-the-return-part-1 https://soundcloud.com/ross-sutherland/71-sex-and-the-city-the-return-part-2 https://soundcloud.com/ross-sutherland/73-ten-thousand-years-part-2 This episode is sponsored by Skillshare and BetterHelp. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. If you've ever searched for my podcast, you probably came across another show with a similar name, Imaginary Advice. Imaginary Advice was created by Ross Sutherland. He is a fiction writer and a playwright in the UK. And our shows aren't that far apart in content.

We both explore our relationship to stories and how it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the real world and the world that we imagine it to be. But Ross's podcast is mostly fiction, and he often plays a version of himself doing slightly fantastical things. And I am constantly amazed by his creativity and how he keeps reinventing his show with every episode. Like in one episode, his character trains an artificial intelligence bot

to do stand-up comedy. Hello, front row. What's your name, sir? Ross Sutherland. What do you do for a living, Ross? I'm a writer. You're a writer? Yes, correct. Ross, does your significant other know that you're a writer?

Yeah. You don't lie or try to hide it? No. I'm only joking. You're all right. Yep, thanks. In another episode, his character tells us that he wrote a novelization of Rumble in the Bronx. And he points out that in many action movies from the 80s and 90s, street gangs were usually dressed as punk rockers,

as if punk music was the cause of urban decay and not a reaction to it. But he fully embraces this idea, and he incorporates it into the inner thoughts of Jackie Chan's character. It seems everything I'd heard was true. Punk rock had corrupted the heart of America. Even as a police officer back in Hong Kong, I'd heard the stories. How this hateful music had turned the youth of this country into amoral, flamboyant crime machines. If only the electric guitar had never been invented, I wouldn't be here.

In fact, there'd be no need for police officers at all. In another episode, Ross finds a cassette tape of himself as a kid making up a story. And this is actually a real cassette tape of him as a child. But then he rewrites the story as an adult using all the fiction writing tools that he has now, while still being very respectful towards himself as a child Yes, it was. It was. It was Boxman. Boxman. Yet the boy has seen in his future the coming of his destructor. His name is Boxman. He's a robot Boxman and he tries to kill people. Ross is very fond of that episode.

I feel quite nostalgic for the freedom with which I wrote stories when I was a kid. And I've been sort of actually a lot of, over a lot of my life, I've been trying to remember that. I'm trying to remember like how fun it was when you could write a story when you didn't quite know even what a story was meant to feel like. And you could sort of feel like that extra degree of kind of like experimentation rather than i don't know how i kind of felt after university where i felt a little bit crushed into feeling that i had to write in a particular uh like literary voice which in retrospect this really doesn't suit me at all i i i much prefer writing stories the way I did when I was five.

How did you come up with the title, Imaginary Advice? As a fellow person with the word imaginary in the title. Do you know what? It would have made a lot more sense if I'd called it Imaginary Worlds. That would have made a lot more sense. I would have disappointed far fewer people. Because I called it imaginary advice because for me and i don't expect anybody else to really get this but this is sort of what

it means personally like i kind of figured that was like two different ways to describe fiction storytelling uh so it's so it's imaginary you know it's uh it's something that comes from the imagination it's something that's simulation but like also fiction can be traditionally it can be like a teaching tool it's something that helps us observe the world hence it's a tool for dispensing advice however when you stick those two words like side by side they do not go together and there's a kind of like friction there they kind of like cancel each other out. Because, you know, if a story is imaginary, then surely, like, the moral is also imaginary. That also is kind of fake. Or if fictions are basically just meant to be, like, thinly veiled moral lessons, don't we have to attribute everything inside the story to being the actual voice of the author, therefore real, therefore not imaginary?

Anyway, like, I just like that friction of how those two things kind of like cancel each other out and i think imaginary advice it sort of exists a little bit in that twilight world you know between fiction and non-fiction and in that kind of space you've got to live with some contradictions i've made my podcast sound incredibly pretentious i now realize but. But that's what I like about it. It can be profound and funny and weird at the same time. Like one of my favorite episodes takes place in the near future. His character moves to New York and becomes obsessed with an off-Broadway show called I Couldn't Help But Wonder.

And this show is a recreation of Sex and the City as a form of interactive, immersive theater. From now on, there is to be no talking. Said a disembodied voice over the turn on. Please do not touch any of the actors unless they touch you first. Keep your flip phone handy. You'd never know who might call. After all, anyone can make it in New York, as long as you know who to talk to. Welcome to New York.

We stepped out into Madison Avenue. At least, At least it looked like it. I knew that in reality we must still be indoors, but somehow there was a sky above us and a breeze. Now, you might remember I did an episode about immersive theater in New York, where instead of sitting in a seat, you're walking around an abandoned warehouse or an old school. And as you go from room to room, the play unfolds around you. But in his story, this recreation of Sex and the City is so ambitious, it fills up an abandoned skyscraper, which isn't totally unrealistic given how many office buildings in Manhattan are vacant because of

the pandemic. The inspiration for the episode came from a trip that he and his wife took to New York on their honeymoon. They went to see an immersive show called Sleep No More, and that show is loosely based on Macbeth. Actually, at the play itself, we had a sort of kind of ambivalent experience we we made some mistakes i was convinced that if i didn't follow the crowds i would be rewarded for my you know for my tenacity or something that like i was just like no no like i don't want to go you know rushing after you know lady macbeth as she kind of goes off to her next scene i'm gonna go in the other direction into this empty room and i will like and maybe something will kind of happen in there

and so i actually didn't see hardly any of the play at all i managed to just always be in the space where nothing was happening and uh my wife did the opposite she was kind of like she just locked onto one person and like rushed around the building all night following that person to sort of make sure she got one clear linear narrative take through the story. So even though we came back from the play and we didn't have like the greatest of experiences through it, I kind of went online after that

and I just started reading all the blogs uh written by you know huge fans of the show and i found those just like utterly fascinating and you know people who had been to see the show you know like yeah like 10 20 times and had just mapped every single part of this kind of this moving experience and they even knew like which actors they preferred playing the parts on different nights i sort of became interested in those people those kind of like those archivists but then so that that's interesting in itself but then for you to think well how am i going to use that creatively you take sex in the city and said it's at the story in new york uh what was the idea behind that during that same trip we uh we bumped into

someone who had done like the sex in the city walking tour of new york who had uh gone to the the magnolia bakery and what have you and we also bumped into someone who had done the Sopranos walking tour of New York, who basically had been shown, oh, like, here's the bin where we shoved so-and-so. I like the idea of, like, how certain cities kind of, like, carry these kind of, like, fictions inside them already. And there's something about sex in the city and it's kind of culture of the vip culture that it sort of like operates within where it's all about oh you know can you get tables to a particular place and you know there's

sex is full of velvet ropes uh which they're trying to navigate their way around you know and that does also sort of like tally with some of the more like cynical examples of of sort of like immersive theater well there's a sliding scale i think at one end i think there's some immersive theater which i have like absolutely loved and had some incredible experiences one-to-one experiences which i which feel really original and different and then at the other end there are things which feel kind of much more like uh interactive theme parks the second part of it i'd say the first part is more about this culture of the dialogue that goes on around theater the second part is much more kind of playing with this way that we take a story and then we can graft all this extra stuff around it, you know, like whether that's just like fan culture or like the,

the meme-ification of a story or just the way that we can regurgitate it and recycle it and review it in blogs and, you know, like find ways of reusing the story to, you know, in a way that it wasn't intended to be used. Yeah, it's so interesting. I definitely relate to the idea that like you can love something so much and then you consume all the media around it that after a while, like the original thing gets lost. And, you know, you almost wonder, like, do I even still like this thing? I mean, is this just nostalgia or uh you know am i seeing things that aren't there you know or is this really just just more about me i i i think that was certainly how i felt yeah for sure and and beyond a certain point you start to kind of

think to yourself yeah if you stare long and hard enough at anything you can change it to mean anything you know like and that stops being a kind of a kind of hypothesis and it starts to feel like facts that like that just symbols are that mutable that you can go there like it particularly if you're willing to sort of enter into um a kind of process of repetition both in your process and maybe with the audience as well you can be like okay watch this once you recognize this now watch it again think about this and then you just keep showing it to them again and again and again yeah soon it's just this kind of weird symbolic wallpaper that you can kind of just like

like uh restructure uh however you want that brings me to the episode of his podcast that I want to focus on. It was actually a two-part episode called 10,000 Years, where he took the plot of a classic Hollywood comedy and turned it into a work of cosmic horror. The inspiration for the episode happened when he learned that in the original screenplay of Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, was supposed to be stuck in that loop for 10,000 years. The filmmakers eventually changed it to be more like 20 or 30 years, but that got Ross thinking. When he's only in for 30 years, whenil comes out the other side he's still going to be like a human being but the phil that comes out the other end of a 10 000 year loop right isn't going to be

human anymore right you're going to become something else and so i kind of love that as a as a sort of writing challenge and i think the original at its heart like the beating heart of groundhog day is cosmic horror it's not presented that way but also like we were talking about like this this this kind of memification of stories we're so familiar with like so many of the scenes in groundhog day it's hard to actually plug into the experience that um Phil Bill Murray's character is uh is going through and once we've seen it through to the end once we sort of know that it's all going to be around for him eventually he's going to exit the loop and when I was writing this episode of Imaginary Vice I think I was at a point where I really wanted to

lock into that message. Because lots of people have spoken about lockdown being a lot like Groundhog Day. And not knowing when it's going to end. Not knowing when it's going to end, yeah. But at that period of time, I kind of feel like I was making the same kind of mistakes that Phil was making at the start, which is that I was obsessing over when it was going to return to normal yeah also to your episode makes me think a lot about like mental health and just like how you handle depression I mean especially during the pandemic which and and like how incredibly isolating that could feel. Yeah. Sometimes giving up on the future is like that process of letting go

is incredibly painful and doesn't automatically come with some kind of cathartic third act where you actually start to focus on the present. After the break, we will hear what happens when Groundhog Day becomes Groundhog

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Try them today only at Tim's at participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. So let's hear part of the episode that Ross produced called 10,000 Years. Now, he often works with collaborators, and for this episode, he asked several friends of his to write short stories, imagining what would happen if Groundhog Day was stretched over the length of human civilization. He ended up commissioning five stories, and some of them include characters from the original movie, but I'm just going to play three of those stories because they focus primarily on the character of Phil and his evolution. The first story was written by Ross, and it imagines,

what if the happy ending that we all know from Groundhog Day was not a game changer that broke the curse? What if it was just another day? 23 years, 11 months, 16 days. Then put your little hand in mine. The wet patch on his shirt was gone. Phil's arm was no longer numb. He lifted it, slowly moving it through the space where Rita's body once was. Phil went to the bathroom.

He brushed his teeth. He had a shit. After that, he went back, sat on the bed, listened to the sound of his heartbeat. Phil didn't go out to Gobbler's Knob that day. It was the first day he'd not turned up for work in maybe over a hundred days. Today, though, he couldn't bear to see Rita, not so soon after she vanished from his bed Instead, Phil just picked a bench And waited out the day The one on East Mahoning Street

There was a bare oak tree across the road Phil just stared at the tree Trying to block out the rest of the world His heart felt like a jagged stone Maybe Thought Phil Lighting a cigarette Maybe

He should never see Rita again It's easy to avoid one person in the sea Even easier If you knew what Phil knew see Rita again. It's easy to avoid one person in the sea. Even easier if you knew what Phil knew. On a day like today, a day where Phil didn't turn up for his job, Phil knew Rita's movements on a day like this

all too well. Right now, Rita would be having a coffee with Larry in the tip top. The time was 12.04 so yeah right now she was just about to order a carrot cake. Rita always ate when she was angry. Rita would have just finished telling Larry that Phil should lose his job. Phil knew to speak. He'd gotten close enough to hear it before. Rita would call Phil incompetent.

She'd call him a creep. She'd be talking about his hair. She hated him. And these days, Phil thought again about last night. He knew that there was no such thing as a perfect day. But still, to look into Rita's eyes again and see no recollection of last night Phil just didn't think he could take it Phil tried to empty his mind lose himself in the tree across the road its branches black bronchioles bifurcating into the sky.

All the things that Oak had seen. How long had it taken to get that tall, that strong? 30 years? 40? Phil had been in Punxsutawney almost as long. Maybe, thought Phil, maybe I'll just sit here for a couple of years and meditate on this tree. I'll sit here and look at this tree until all memory of Rita leaves my brain. At that point, the boy climbing the tree slipped from his high branch and slammed face first into the hard concrete below. Oh yeah, thought Phil, the kid.

In the eleven years since Phil first learnt of Charlie's accident, this was the first day that he'd forgotten to catch him. A passing car screeched to a halt. An elderly couple ran to the young boy's aid. Phil recognised the couple as Betty and Chuck from the wool shop down the road. They turned the boy over to make sure he could breathe. A jogger ran to find a payphone. Phil left to get a drink.

He felt terrible, of course, but after a couple of scotches, he began to see things a little clearer. If I can forget the kid once, thought Phil, maybe I can forget him forever? And if so, who knows, maybe I can forget other things too. too. Phil looked at the ice in his tumbler. Each piece looked like a sculpture of Rita's head. Three little decapitated Rita heads, slowly dissolving in a lake of scotch. Anything's possible, thought Phil. Anything's possible. 2,742 years. Four months. Twelve days. Written by

Lenny Sanders Sandra is one of several administrative staff at the St. Francis of Assisi school, Punxsutawney. She sits at her desk folding the day's exclusion letters into perfect Z folds. The paper makes a crisp satisfying line where it is folded, sharp and simple. Andrew will be excluded for one day for foul language. Maggie will be excluded for a week for poisoning the form room fish. The letters slide sleekly and handsomely into their envelopes. Earlier this morning, when Sandra first got up, she saw wavering halos around the light bulbs.

Glowing in every colour. She doesn't know why. If she could just get it back. The light was like oil in a puddle, looking so real in the air. Impossible to touch, but she knew that it would feel like satin if she could. It would be nice to be able to tell someone about the colours without feeling dumb, Sandra thinks. She imagines someone coming in and asking, what's up? And being able to tell them everything.

Someone she could trust like that. Outside now, a strain of birdsong is coming in. Sandra can't place it. Dad is a birder, and often showed her when she was little the bird book, the one with illustrations, and written out descriptions of the voices of the birds. The common yellow throat is supposed to sing, witchety, witchety, witchety. In the grey air, she can see his breath making a little plume of steam as he sings. The man in the tree, in his regular clothes. He has climbed fairly high up, holding

branches in his left and right hands like ski poles. He looks like someone in a trance. Like someone who can see something nobody else can. Like her ex-girlfriend on acid, amazed by daytime television. His smart brown overcoat flaps in the wind. For a man with a face so well shaped for being sardonic, he looks sincere, like a good listener. The man singing in the tree makes a series of complicated, deft movements with his mouth. He makes a small whistling dot of it.

Then he opens it so wide she can almost see his teeth glinting, although he is far away. Hundreds of birds, coming down out of the sky at a gentle speed, like a pillow torn open dropping feathers. They are all the birds of the land. Crows, blue jays, geese off the water, eagles, a heavy moody vulture, doves, chickadees, grackles, birds, birds, birds, a flurry of them, faster now, completely covering him from view, completely covering the tree in new soft leaves, the boughs drooping under the weight. Sandra closes her eyes and finds... He is like the light containing all the colours. He makes it come back for her, as if she had told him exactly what she lost.

It is as if he has been practicing for years, to show her. She opens her eyes. There is a movement, a great shaking of wings, and the birds lift away together. The man, his arms raised in song, is being carried away into the air by this springily connected ball of birds. They go easily, as if it is just a matter of catching the air current correctly. Does he seem to salute her? 9999 years 11 months 30 days

Written by Ross Sutherland The entity once known as Phil Connors lies in the structure once known as the Cherry tree in. The entity has no words to speak. It has no needs or wants, no intentions. Simply by existing, the entity claims its inalienable right to exist. It does not open what was once its eyes, does not defecate nor urinate from what was once its schlong. Every 32 minutes it takes one breath of air into its lungs.

The limbs of the entity once known as Phil Connors have not moved for three thousand years and yet there is no atrophy. If the entity wanted it could jump up from its bed this second. It could dance to Charleston and smash through this hotel window. It could murder every living thing in a ten mile radius and no human could stand in its way. No human could stand in its way. Every single branching outcome it would have already faced a thousand times over. It could walk naked towards you through a volley of bullets without so much as a scratch.

But these are ancient myths now. The century of blood has long faded, as has the century of learning, the century of self-annihilation, the brief beekeeping phase. After a millennia of searching, the entity has chosen a final, single path. It has chosen to do nothing. To be nothing. To remove its influence on the universe entirely. Perhaps with this decision, this was the moment that the entity once known as Phil Connors finally became God. The entity once known as Phil Connors can now feel the vibration of every single insect in the lawn outside.

It can feel the frequency of every light bulb, the wattage consumption of every electrical device. It can taste the moisture on every forehead. It can hear the books in the library decomposing. It knows the tumescence of every dog penis, the volume of every dying breath. This single day traced over and over and over again until it became the whole universe. Like that golden phonograph record they shot into space. A four-dimensional sculpture of the universe, all 3.4 square miles of it, held gently in the entity's mind like a snow globe.

On what used to be called a nightstand, the number wheel mechanism of the flip clock rotates the hour page from 5 to 6 and... The universe is reborn. 10,000 years. The dead skin cells on what used to be the forehead of Phil Connors reincarnate themselves as the room fills with music. They say we're young, and we don't grow. We won't find out, and we don't know. In just under three minutes, the radio alarm will automatically turn itself off again, but in this brief musical intermission,

the entity hears its own creation myth. The waltz time oboe of I got you babe, swirls around the entity like a shroud, like a shore, end and beginning, the Alpha and the Omega, existence and non-existence. The voice of Salvatore Philip Bono and Cherylin Lapierre Sarcassian, vibrating through everything, as if the words were spoken by the planet core itself. With these words the entity once known as Phil Connors makes its one and only movement. Its lips silent, open and closed around the chorus. The voice of the entity and the voice of the universe, each speaking to the other, in that same gentle register, like the voice of the smallest kid in class, when they pick up the school guinea pig, hold it to their lips and say, I've got you.

I've got you. I've got you. I've got you. I put a link to all the episodes we discussed in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted emulinski and Imagine Worlds pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media. It always helps people discover imaginary worlds or, in this case, imaginary advice. The best way to support the podcast is to donate on Patreon. At different levels,

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