Imaginary Worlds - Monsters of 2020

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

2020 has felt monstrous on so many levels. So, it’s no coincidence that two of the top grossing movies of the year were Jaws and Jurassic Park, mostly seen at drive-in theaters. Alex Shepard explains why the shark in Jaws embodied our feeling of a dread, and how the Mayor of Amity Island seemed to be the embodiment of every leader who dismissed the seriousness of COVID. Sean T. Collins explores whether the real villain of Jurassic Park was not the dinosaurs but capitalism. And I talk with journalist Rae Paoletta, along with my assistant producer Stephanie Billman, about the most insidious monster of 2020 -- the corrupt and adorable oligarch Tom Nook who put every Animal Crossing player in debt to him. Today's episode is brought to you by Wondery's podcast Little Stories Everywhere, ConvertKit and BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Back in March, when New Yorkers learned that the city was about to head into lockdown, Alex Shepard was out buying essentials. I'd done my last supply run, which of course was to Astor Wine and Spirits. And I was sort of walking back burdened with all this wine, and there were just hundreds of people out in Washington Square Park. That was when it sort of hit me that this is going to be really, really, really bad here, really, really quickly. And this was a time when a lot of people were watching movies like Outbreak or Contagion

to prepare them for what was to happen. But those movies just didn't feel right to Alex. And when he saw those people in the park, he thought about another movie, Jaws. That combination of people sort of frolicking about as if nothing is wrong and this killer sort of lurking just beneath the surface is something that's hit me again and again. This is a situation in which,

one, the experts are being ignored, but when given conflicting pieces of information, people tend to end up doing what they want to do, right? And in that case, you go to the beach on a holiday weekend. You know, you go in the water. This music has become a very familiar trope over the years. But suddenly, Alex was able to imagine what it must have been like to hear that music for the first time and how it must have hit audiences at a gut level.

What we've been looking for this entire year are just ways to express this general sense of dread. It's a word I keep coming back to. Trying to find slow-moving dread in art is not necessarily easy. I think Jaws captures it really, really well. Although that feeling of slow-moving dread was not the original plan. The mechanical sharks that Steven Spielberg had commissioned didn't work. So for most of the movie, the camera becomes the point of view of the shark. The way that the camera moves as the shark, there's a certain almost wry intelligence

about the way it moves, but also this determination to kill. I mean, one of the other things, going back particularly to the earlier part of this year, was the dominant sense that whenever you're out in the world, there is this lingering possibility that something terrible is about to happen. Alex wrote an article for The New Republic about how Jaws felt like the movie of 2020, with a shark as the metaphor for COVID. But he was not the only journalist to make that connection. And a lot of these articles ended up really being about the mayor of Amity Island, a character named Larry Vaughn, who was played by Murray Hamilton.

It's all psychological. You yell barracuda devices. Huh, what? You yell shark. We've got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July. In 2020, Mayor Vaughn suddenly felt like the embodiment of every leader who initially dismissed the seriousness of COVID. I mean, Boris Johnson actually said years ago in an interview

that he thought the mayor was the real hero of Jaws because he kept the beaches open. Although those words came back to haunt him this year. But Alex still sees Mayor Vaughn as a quintessentially American type of character. My favorite line in the movie is when he's talking to a reporter on the beach and he says, But as you see, it's a beautiful day. The beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time. There's, I think, a particular brand of optimism, of foolish optimism that I think is uniquely

American. It's the kind of thing that, you know, Tocqueville writes about, you know, that it's the Huckster character as well, that, you know, going back to P.T. Barnum, but I think certainly the music man, there are all these great, great, and quotation marks, but these great American figures

who are at once kind of, they're naive and they're cynical at the same time. They're innocent and they're conniving. They're both optimistic, but they're also always running a con on somebody. They're charming and repellent at the same time. Yes, that's exactly right. There's a populist energy, but beneath that, not far beneath it is this upset absolute obsession with the economic bottom line yeah one of my favorite lines is when um you know richard dreyfus who in this case seems like standing in for all scientists in 2020 is explaining all this stuff to him those proportions are correct love to prove that wouldn you? Get your name into the National Geographic.

That moment of like, Dreyfus is so incredulous, he bursts out laughing. I kept thinking of that scene, you know, when all these scientists were suddenly being discounted. Yeah, and I think, you know, there's this idea of, you know, Mervon is so intent on the fact that this can't possibly be happening. He's so determined to ignore anyone who's putting what's obviously going on in front of him that he just starts saying anything he can possibly think of to discount these people. One of the scenes for me that sticks out

for thinking about my 2020 at least is when Sheriff Brody, he sort of finally gloms on to what's happening and he goes home and just starts reading books about sharks. You know, this guy from New York. And I was like, oh, this is the 1970s version of Doomscrolling. Oh, that's so true. It's like all those horrific pictures of shark bites and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, what we've all been doing. You know, people don't you know, what we've all been doing. You know, Alan, people don't even know how old sharks are. I mean, if they lived 2,000, 3,000 years, they don't know. Enough. Enough. You're not going to even be able to go to sleep tonight here. So as I mentioned, there were a lot of articles about Jaws being the movie of the year. But Jaws had serious competition from another Spielberg film, Jurassic Park. And it wasn't just journalists who were making that connection. Jaws and Jurassic Park were actually competing for the top spot at the

drive-in box office, because drive-ins were the best way to watch movies in public this year. And a group of comedians set up a Jurassic Park parody account on Twitter called Jurassic Park to Go, which has over 320,000 followers. They tweet things like, we are hard at work trying to create a vaccine for being eaten by a dinosaur, or just found half a guest, hope he got his ticket half price, haha, or do you guys think Sean T. Collins writes for the site Polygon. His editor assigned him a story about why so many people were saying Jurassic Park felt like the movie of the year. So he rewatched the film. He hadn't seen it in years. And he was surprised to discover that every major decision in the plot, often every bad decision, was driven by money.

And he began to wonder, is the real monster in this movie capitalism? The whole reason that the characters played by Laura Dern and Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum arrive on the island in the first place is because of the accident, quote unquote, that takes place at the very beginning of the film when a worker is killed by the velociraptors. At that point, the insurance company starts balking and there's a lawsuit filed by the family of the worker. They need to bring in these outside experts to calm the insurance company down and calm the investors down. I mean, let's face it, in your particular field, you're the top minds. And if I could just persuade you to sign off on the park, you know, get your endorsement,

maybe even pen a wee testimony, I could get back on schedule. You know, and I don't think I remembered that at all. I think I just figured like, oh, he's bringing them in to show it off because they're famous. And the whole idea that they were stress testing it to make sure that the cash flow would still continue kind of sailed by me. Another thing that surprised him was that he actually had a newfound appreciation for one of the villains, Dennis Nedry, who's played by Wayne Knight, who of course is even more famous for playing Newman on Seinfeld. He's the one who sabotages the park so he can try and sneak off a collection of dinosaur embryos to sell to a rival company. The whole reason he's doing that is because he's not, he feels he isn't

being paid what he's worth. And he actually has like a little tiff on screen with John Hammond, the character played by Richard Attenborough, who owns the park. Like he doesn't want to give Nedry more money because it would teach Nedry the wrong lesson. You know anybody who can network eight connection machines and debug two million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if you can, I'd love to see him try. I'm sorry about your financial problems, Dennis. I really am, but they are your problems. Oh, you're right, John. You're absolutely right. You know everything's my problem. In fact, the whole film basically proves his point

because they can't do anything without him. He's like the one guy who was holding the whole park together. And Samuel L. Jackson says, without an engineer, I can't get Jurassic Park back online. And it's like, well, they probably should have been paying him more then. The character of John Hammond, who runs the park, is definitely more sympathetic than the mayor in Jaws. But John says that doesn't make Hammond less of a villain.

Hammond is like Santa Claus, right? You know, he's got he's like a jolly figure. He's got that British accent and he's got his white beard. And I think also he has this sort of childlike enthusiasm about the park. Like he's just, you know, we have a T-Rex. T-Rex? You said you've got a t-rex say again we have a t-rex welcome to jurassic park what do you think what do you think is his fatal flaw exactly i think his belief in money i think it's really as simple as that. Like, how could everything go wrong?

They spared no expense. So when things do go wrong, he's almost completely unprepared. So it's not just like the greed of wanting to make money, but the magical power of money. Right, right. It does have a transformative effect on people throughout the film. Like Gennaro, who's the sleazy lawyer, he is at first like a real skeptic about the project. You know, he's the one kind of complaining about we have to please the investors, we have to please the insurance company. But then once he sees the dinosaurs, he's like, we're going to make a fortune at this place.

And his mindset completely shifts where he is now like the biggest booster of the park and the biggest, he's the biggest skeptic towards the skeptics. Money has this sort of talismanic power that transforms how people look at what the park is and what the park does. A slow-moving deadly shark may feel like a more accurate metaphor for COVID than a velociraptor. But the way that Jurassic Park is run, the park itself within the movie, has 2020 written all over it. Like when Sean first saw the movie in the 90s, he didn't see the employees of the park as anything more than dinosaur food.

But now he started thinking of them as essential workers. Essential workers are the people who basically have to go out there and wave the flares around so that the T-Rex doesn't attack the children. The T-Rex attacks them instead. What about also the reopening of Disney World?

That was, I remember when they first came out with those videos and it was so dystopian. Like, we're open for business. And it was like, okay. Something seemed really creepy about having the happiest place on earth reopen with everyone wearing masks. And it just seemed like this insistence on like, no, we're going to have a good time. Damn it. Or to go completely meta, Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth Jurassic Park movie, went back into production this summer. The cast and crew took 40,000 COVID tests. People could have literally died so the franchise could

keep making money. And I thought Sean would agree that this is totally absurd, but he was more sympathetic. It's hard because if movies aren't getting shot, pathetic you know it's it's hard because you know you know if movies aren't getting shot all the people who work on films you know not actors who are going to do fine at least the kind of actors who star in these movies but you know working actors and the crew theater employees who sell popcorn ticket takers and all that kind of stuff. There's a whole ecosystem in danger of collapse. And so on the one hand, it's obviously like, you know, there's no pressing need to make Jurassic World Dominion that's worth people dying. But at the same time, so many people are in a position where they have no choice but to work and but to hope that their employers

continue to push forward as dangerous as that is. Spielberg's blockbusters have often been dismissed as pure escapist entertainment, the movie equivalent of a theme park ride. And over the years, he's tried to prove that he is a serious filmmaker, not just the guy who makes blockbusters. But if these movies are resonating with people, decades later, in the worst of times,

maybe they're more artful than a lot of critics realized when they first came out. Again, here's Alex Shepard. He's been very, very good at positioning blockbuster movies and mass entertainment as ways of thinking through the kind of larger political environment. I think Jurassic Park is very much a movie that's expressing ambivalence about a, you know, post-Cold War world in which, you know, untrammeled capitalism has won, right? It's not only won, but it's, you know, running amok across the globe. And Jaws, I think, is a smaller movie to some extent, but, you know, it was also filmed while

the Watergate hearings were happening. When you read accounts of it being made, it's, you know, they're having parties at night based on what's happening in Congress. but it's a view of America and politics itself, I think, is jaundiced by the Nixon administration. Now, if you were to ask people who saw Jaws or Jurassic Park at a drive-in this summer, whether they drove away discussing politics or late-stage capitalism, the answer would probably be no.

But Sean says that is the magic of a Spielberg blockbuster. It can work on completely different levels. Fantasy, science fiction, horror. You know, what they do is they provide us with imagery and ideas that are big enough and spectacular enough or horrifying enough to give voice to everyday emotions and feelings for which everyday vocabulary is it's not up to the task of conveying the severity of how we feel so we turn to genre work because it feels like we feel even if it's not realistic. This is obviously not dinosaurs running around eating anybody right now.

But reaching that far and giving us something that big, something about it feels right. And I think that in large part is the value of genre work. It has a vocabulary of imagery and a vocabulary of ideas that suit the way we feel. This year, some people wanted to escape reality entirely and go to a virtual world where they could build a paradise on an island full of cute little animals. But the most insidious monster of 2020 may have been lurking in that little world. We will take a trip to Animal Crossing after the break. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea.

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do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. One of the biggest video games of the year was Animal Crossing. The game itself is almost 20 years old, but a new version called Animal Crossing. The game itself is almost 20 years old, but a new version called Animal Crossing New Horizons came out in March for Nintendo Switch. And so far, it's sold 26 million copies. I saw firsthand my assistant producer Stephanie Billman was practically living a second life in that game. As you see all of this craziness going on around you, you don't really

have a lot of control what's going down. We don't have any control over COVID. We don't have any control over, you know, with whatever the heck's going on, you know, politically. But here's this game where you can create your own island and you can fashion it however you want. There's no right way or wrong way to do it. And that's nice. You know, it gives you a sense of control when there's this chaos surrounding you. When the game begins, you get a little avatar that you can customize to look like yourself, if that's what you want. And you get to live on this beautiful little island. The game is all about world building. Your goal is to keep improving your island and turn it

into a five-star resort. To buy anything, you use a currency called bells, which doesn't actually cost real money. You work in the game to earn bells, like you can go fishing or insect hunting or grow fruit trees, and then you sell your bounty to these animal characters who live on your island. You can also trade with other players, who you don't usually see in the game, but there are ways to get in contact with them. In fact, there's an Amazon-type website within Animal Crossing so players can barter with each other, because each person's island comes with different natural resources. But you don't have to spend all of your bells on improving your island resort. You can also buy little outfits for your avatar.

And like, I've spent way more money on way more bells on outfits than anybody should. Like, I have like a mariachi outfit. What am I going to do with that? But I bought it because it was on sale. Ray Paoletta is a journalist who's written about Animal Crossing for the site Inverse and other media outlets. She got addicted to Animal Crossing because she was dealing with a personal disappointment. For context, I was supposed to have my wedding in March. And of course, because of the pandemic, I didn't get to have that. So basically, my daily life and my animal crossing, like fake life were becoming

blended and the lines between them were just not like so clear anymore. The animal characters on your island speak gibberish and their translations appear like subtitles. And the character that you interact with the most is called Tom Nook. I actually thought Tom Nook was a raccoon wearing a green sweater and a tie. But Ray says he's actually a tanuki. Which is a real animal. Like a tanuki is actually a Japanese raccoon dog. And they have a long history in Japanese culture of kind of like similar to how we in the States maybe would say that the fox is like a trickster or sly.

That's kind of how the Tanuki is portrayed. When Stephanie started playing the game, she had no idea how tricky Tom Nook would turn out to be. When you start, you know, you start with a tent. And I came from this not knowing anything, So I had no idea what was going on. So I just thought, okay, so I'm supposed to live in a tent for this whole time? Like, this doesn't seem like any fun. And then he like comes and he's like, Oh, if you want a house, you know, I can loan you some money. himself, he's just, he just comes off as like this really happy-go-lucky, you know, he wants to make sure that everyone's having fun at the island. But, you know, at the end of the day, he makes the rules. His nephews own the only dry goods store. There's no kind of like villager vote where you can come together and decide on the policies in the island. He makes everything like he makes the laws, but he's also your landlord and he's also the building contractor.

So, I mean, did your feelings about him change over time? Like it sounds like at first you liked him and then you're like, this is weird. And then as you just kept playing the game, did you just sort of get used to him or did you get more annoyed by him oh i got more annoyed if you want to move a building you have to go pay him 50 000 bells and he gives you this moving kit and he gives it to you and he kind of has this look on his face like haha i got you suckered because when you go do the moving kit you put it you place it where you want it to be. And the way that the placement works, it's easy for you to misalign. You can be off just by an inch from what you wanted. And guess what? Just because you're off that one inch, once it's built, and once you give them that 50,000 bells, you have to pay another 50,000 bells to move that same damn building. And I ended up spending like a million

bells on that crap. And it really pissed me off because it was like, a million bells is a lot of cash. You know, I'm fishing for days to get a million bells. It just, it never ends. The loans never end with him. I asked Ray whether Tom Nook's conflict of interest as your landlord, building contractor, and loan officer would be illegal in the real world. That's a great question. I think he definitely should be tried, like perhaps at the Hague. So, you know, this game, I assume, is not supposed to be a critique of capitalism. It's supposed to be a fun game.

But, I mean, if it's saying anything about capitalism, like what do you think it's saying? I think that one of the interesting things about Animal Crossing and how capitalist it is, is that you really don't have a choice. If you want to build anything on your island, if you want to get your island to the five-star rating, which like unlocks certain other things in the game, you have to be able to buy and build certain things.

And so you have to work. It's literally labor. The entire game is built around laboring so that you can buy the things you need to feel good about yourself. And if that's not the best description of capitalism, I don't know what is. Stephanie agrees.

The capitalism gives you these goals that i think a socialist version of it wouldn't be like what are you going to do like collectively like grow potatoes like that's not fun but at the same time the minute i get off i get off nintendo switch i'm like universal health care for all, you know. So it's clearly for me, it's not, you know, translating well. But I mean, at the same time, I'm like the biggest capitalist that you ever want to see when I'm on my island. Now, when Animal Crossing first came out in 2001, it was actually a much harsher game. Tom Nook was just angry and condescending. And there were other animal characters trying to shake you down for money. With each new version of the game, Tom Nook was given a makeover until he became this happy-go-lucky

booster. And a lot of players have defended Tom Nook. They think he helps them out, gives them a loan without interest, and he teaches them how to be an entrepreneur. But this whole thing is still pretty weird. I mean, think about Minecraft. It's a similar game where you're building a little world for yourself. But all these kids who get sucked into Minecraft don't find themselves in debt to a shady real estate developer. Although Stephanie says if Tom Nook were totally obnoxious on top of all that, she wouldn't put up with him. Tom works hard.

He really does seem to care about making the island a beautiful place for everyone. And he gives you advice on how to make it prettier. Like he tries to do things that he thinks will attract more people. attract more people. Like he always tries to get this particular singer called K.K. Slider, who sucks, by the way, to come to the island because he's such an international pop star that if he comes to the island and does concerts, then that'll make more people want to come visit. It's a dog playing a guitar and not very well. I asked Ray if they were to do an update of Animal Crossing where they got rid of Tom Nook completely. Would the game be better?

She says no. Like there's just something that draws me back to this robber baron that is Tom Nook, where I feel like he's become such a central part of the game. There is something about him that makes me feel like, yeah, this is what Animal Crossing is all about. I do think that, you know, he should be tried for his crimes, but I think that the game is not the same without him. And as they say, the real treasure were the friends that she made along the way. I joined a bunch of groups that I actually made a lot of friends from on Twitter where we would have this Sunday thing

called the stock market because in Animal Crossing, if you don't know, you could buy turnips on Sundays. You have to tell your friends like, okay, like my prices are good today. You can come to my island. You could buy the turnips. They're cheap. And then later in the week, you can sell them.

So you flip a profit. So it's funny, though, because you're still you're also gaming the system. I mean, there's a little Tom Nook in you. Yeah, it absolutely was. You know, but again, much like capitalism, we're all forced to become the very thing we hate to a certain degree to survive. 2020 was not about creating perfect worlds. It was about survival, picking your battles, looking for monsters you can slay, and deciding you can live with the rest for now. and deciding you can live with the rest for now. And in a way, what Tom Nook is teaching you is what a lot of protagonists in horror movies have learned,

how to survive by channeling the monster inside of you. Hey, hey, got all these fits in my closet Man, if you want it, I got it I need to make a deposit Ain't the most space in my pockets I need my paper like Tom Nook I need my paper like Tom Nutt. I need my paper like Tom Nutt. I need my paper like Tom Nutt.

I need my paper like Tom Nutt. Let's get it. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Alex Shepard, Shanti Collins, Ray Paoletta, and my assistant producer, Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted E. Malinsky and Imagine Worlds pod.

If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or do a shout out on social media. It always helps people discover imaginary worlds. And channeling my inner Tom Nook, I have to tell you that the best way to support imaginary worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels,

you can get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at my newly redesigned website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Outro Music