librarypunk - 030 - horrorpunk feat. Horror Vanguard

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Welcome boils and ghouls, to the first episode of horrorpunk, the premiere podcast for information science and materialist analysis of horror movies starring your favorite co-ghosts from the Horror Vanguard podcast, Ash and Jon. We talk about loss and how we deal with it, and the sometimes bad habits that creates for us in seeking explanations. We also talk (well, glance over) how Irish Americans continue to appropriate Celtic nationalism for no real reason. And we answer the question: who’s gonna pay this dang ghost?  https://twitter.com/HorrorVanguard https://twitter.com/TheLitCritGuy https://twitter.com/darrowvania https://www.youtube.com/c/JonTheLitCritGuy

Greetings, patrons of Pestilus to our card catalogues, the stacks of spookies, the ILS of ills, the metadata of misery, the D-Space of despair. Welcome to Horrorpunk. I'm Justin. I'm a spooky gulmunications librarian, and my pronouns are he and him. I'm Jay and I wish I would have come up with a spooky version of my title and my pronouns are he him and we have guests would you like to introduce yourselves yeah my name my name is Ash and I my pronouns are he and him and I guess I'm a haunted call card filing cabinet

yeah hello everybody my name is John I go by the lick create guy online I also use he him pronouns I am an adjunct professor in the most cursed higher education institute of them all. The neoliberal capitalist one naturally. I'm also an assistant professor. It's the worst. Justin spent way too much time on drops before this. That's my clattering teeth drop.

No, I just watched The Empty Man. Don't play any clackering or chattering near me for like two weeks at least. God. Have you all seen that movie? I'm terrified now. So we're here to talk about pay the ghost, a 2015 movie starring Nick Cage, about really, I think it says a lot about the gig economy, how you have to pay ghosts these days, how you can just have a smartphone app and a ghost comes to your house. And they can't unionize thanks to Prop 22. Prop 20 boo.

Oh, my God. I'm sorry. Boo. And why do we have our guests with us? So our guests are from some podcasts known as the horror vanguard. Would you like to tell us about your podcast? Absolutely. We would love to tell you about our podcast.

Our podcast is dedicated to talking about three of the most important things in our world, which is number one and most importantly, friendship. Number two, horror movies. And number three, the necessity for the abolition of capitalism and the movement towards communism. We talk about horror movies. We talk about radical political theory. We talk about the ways in which horror as a mode of cultural production enables us to understand process and tear apart the greatest monster of them all, which is capitalism and the ways in which it imprisons and tortures us all. Ash, did I miss anything? I think that covers it. You can find the show, wherever good podcasts are distributed to your listening ears, as well as on social media,

which we haunt on a regular basis. Great, and all that will be in the notes, of course, and all the links, and we'll tag you when the episode comes out. This was a follow-up to an episode we just did with All Gamers Are Bastards, and that gave us a connection. To you guys, you reached out and asked if we wanted to talk about libraries and horror films.

And so what I did is I reached out to Twitter to tell me about libraries and horror films. And it turns out there aren't really interesting depictions of libraries and horror films, hardly ever. Which surprised the hell out of me because the whole thing, I think I mentioned this in one of the tweets. A colleague of mine at the University of Washington have for a few years now been wanting to write a paper. on information seeking in horror films because there's always, like, that's a huge part of the plot. And like, there's always like a sexy microfiche scene or something. And so I was actually like, wait, there's none that are actually mainly in libraries and that just surprised me. And sadly, we had already done an entire episode on Name of the Rose. So couldn't do that one.

But then there's Pay the Ghost starring Nicholas Cage. And where would we be without Pay the Ghost, honestly. I didn't know how you wanted to approach this. Are we going to hear one of your famous Precisee? Well, luckily, luckily, I was in the library doing my research and I prepared ahead, and I do indeed have one. There's a lot we're going to say about pay the ghost, but I wanted to focus on what the title suggests. That we must make payment to our ghosts for means and ends that are, even in the context of this movie, ill-defined. The ghosts of Gothic fiction are emissaries from the past.

They rise up through our collective tragedies and remind us for the wounds we have yet to heal. In this sense, they are owed a debt. This is, of course, because the debt owed to the dead is a debt owed to ourselves, and the people we falsely identify as the living. To live, to breathe, and to love is to die. The boundary is only challenged in the most ghoulish capitalist fantasies, Martian colonies and eternalized billionaire god kings, but it is also challenged in the near poetic exaltations of Soviet cosmism,

that the debt are not lost to the project of liberation, and, by its very definition, we must reach backwards through history, time, and the grave. We would be wise to do as Mike Laughford does and recognize that the boundaries between the so-called living and dead are ephemeral and crossed in an instant. Lawford connects personal, geographic and political histories into his quest for personal healing. In this moment, he realizes the basics of a total liberation for the no longer living and the not yet dead. This quest sends him

back through the history of colonial forces and forces him to abandon the profane halls of academia. He realizes that there is a wisdom in abandoned gutters and parts the veil of class antagonism. The history of his community is not just in a library's moldering collection of documents. but in the memories of people our society forces to the margins. Dear listeners, we are the lawfords. The lost children haunted by forgotten ghosts, the researchers in pursuit of something they cannot fully see, and the mourner attempting to move on.

We all have a debt to the dead, perhaps better understood as a debt to the dead alive, and we must pay the ghost. Yeah, bravo. always, always a privilege. And, you know, when Ash started doing these, he was very kind of like self-effacing about them. And I said, right from the beginning,

we can never get rid of this segment. We can never get rid of it. Because one day what's going to happen is not only will we have an episode, which is just an hour-long pricey from Ash, but we're going to have to like, we're going to have to transcribe them all and then publish it as like, the HV bumper book of fun horror movies. I've been going back through y'all's back catalog,

and it's been so interesting to hear the like, let's give the regular plot to these amazing, like theoretical treatises as for each one. It was like, it's been really fun. Thank you. Yeah, I've been listening for a while, and I wasn't sure exactly how to approach it because I am trained in

history. I never took a class on film, not even once. Whereas Jay has written whole just works onto Shiro Mifune's penis alone. Actually, yes. I have a degree in English, but I was working on like a film minor in college. And then my, my boyfriend actually has a degree in film. So we're like those assholes when we go on dates. That's amazing. I think we saw Titan last night. And I was like, I hope people aren't annoyed by us, like, keeping leaning over making, this is like, that one documentary. Yeah, I saw that, I saw that, I think last week, and I tried to go to, like, a noon showing opening day, hoping no one would be there because I'm the guy in the back row, like, taking notes on my cell phone while the movie's going. And I'm just like, please don't let anyone be annoyed by this. Yeah, people walked out, but we were the people in the front.

There was only people behind us, but yeah, we think people walked out of our showing us. I was like, uh-oh, New Hampshire is not prepared for Teton, it seems. I mean, how could they have prepared? Exactly. I like this movie because when I find this movie interesting because I think I started listening to Horror Vanguard either when it was either the Oviroa episode somehow got shared and that was the first one I started with or it was Mandy, which I went out and immediately watched. and I loved it. And I realized this movie is just one year before Mandy. And it's it's a completely by the book kind of horror movie. You've been talking recently about how like horror movies are guaranteed income like people will just go see them. So it kind of explains a lot about like why is

most of the scares in this movie just the sound going low and then getting loud. And it's like, oh, because that's cheap to do. Yeah. Because it costs literally. no money and in fact you don't even have to decide to do that as a director you just give that to your sound editor and my favorite moment in the film where they do this is where they try and jump scare you with a piece of graffiti it's where he first spots the pay the ghost that scrolled on the wall and we get the blah and it's like oh okay like randomly the score decides it's like dubstep now a few times the inception noise drop that's in this movie every like five seconds. Yeah, I love the jump scares in this. What a fascinating film.

Given that this is from the director of perhaps one of the best pieces of German cinema about the Bartham Meinhof gang. And I'm like, how did we go from talking about radical left politics in Germany that was nominated for an Oscar? It was nominated for loads of kind of big industry awards to making honestly one of the one of the sort of most wrote and and kind of you could graph this movie right you could you could you could transcribe this onto a graph of the various plot points and you know a year separates this and mandy and what what a difference a year makes to how we should approach the the theuteur theory the star theory of mr nicholas of oscar winner nicholas cage in terms of his performance though i

I will say there was one thing that I was expecting to happen that I was, that didn't, which is when Charlie disappears. So, so, okay, hang on. I guess we should just recap the movie a little bit. So we start out in the Vavich times. And there's children underground and they're coming for the Vovic. It's just alternate perspective of the beginning of the glorious bastards. Yep.

Yes. We have decided not to live deliciously. It's fine. Let's just keep it going. And so then it's Halloween, 2015. And Nick Cage is working in what I can only assume is like Parliament. It looked like Christchurch College at Oxford, to be honest. That's like I had to go on IMDB.

Like they did not go to Oxford. They didn't. No. Toronto must be like that. I couldn't figure out what building they were in. I just never know who's on staff this late. Like someone the other day was getting mad because we weren't open on Saturdays. And I was like, who's open at 9 p.m. for Nick Cage to read three books that he couldn't take home?

And also his phone was dead, but he had his laptop right there. I just need people to know that academic reading rooms don't look like this. They have computers. They have printers. They have people sleeping on couches. That is what a college library looks like. And like no librarian would like, especially because it seemed like this was like past closing or something. Like no librarian would be like, oh, yeah.

faculty member, because faculty members are great to us famously. We'll let you stay in the library after we're closed to do your silly Gertrta research. It'll be fine. Yeah, the sheer absence of like hungover sophomores attempting to write an essay on Hamlet in the background. Like, that's so unrealistic. And I love how it actually never gives us her job title, which one thing I thought was so interesting about this film and I wish it would have pushed it more, which is just like this focus on labor, weirdly, and like profession. But it never tells us if Hannah's a librarian or like an archivist or a special collections person or just another random researcher there.

I'm like, how many movies has Nick Cage done where there's like a random foreign blonde lady who like speaks in an accent? Well, that's how you know she's an archivist. Really, my kind of theory here is that like this doesn't actually take place in, like, Nick Cage films don't actually take place in the world, so to speak. What they take place in this kind of weird interstitial dimensional void. And like extraneous cultural objects will occasionally fall in or like through this void. And they will be like, so it's like Nick Cage is a bull rider who has to track down a cult of car mechanics.

And this one, what happened was a collected edition of Gertes Faust. and a tweed jacket fell, fell into the void. And from that, like, clearly some sort of AI algorithm generated a screenplay. That's my only theory on how this film kind of works. Because his performance is fine at it. Yeah. He's great. I love that fucking sweater vest look he has when he's doing his,

I hope I get tenure, as if getting tenure's going to be a surprise when you're that far along in the process. I am so here for dark academia, Cage, that is a look. I screamed when he got, when he like got up and it was like this red sweater vest with this really bad blue shirt. I was screaming. It was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life.

And I love this vision of like, you know, like the ivory tower of academia too. Like, because this is literally the scene from Indiana Jones. It's that same lecturing sequence. It's exactly the same scene. You've got all the like hot students

kind of batting eyes at Nick Cage. And then he's like, in no circumstance ever, would you be able to crack a joke about the Earl King and get a bunch of freshmen to laugh at it? Like, that is like a completely unbelievable thing to have happen. And whoever wrote this has like no connection. Like, but Hamet, sorry, like, I'm like going off on this, but like there's that scene later on where he's like tired, completely dispirited, trying to convince people that the title of some spooky story has a meaning. And there's like two students in the classroom. tells us everything we need to know right up front. And like all his students are asleep.

I was like, okay, like that's much more realistic. Thankfully, the title of the film also made the same choice. Also, also Nick Cage pronouncing Johann Goethe's full name will now live in my head, rent-free, until I die. What I love is that it's always Nick Cage, right? there's never an attempt to kind of like, how would this character act or speak or would they have a different accent? No, it's just Nicholas Cage and he is going to recite the last two stanzas of Dasilkeneg in English. And it's so weird. But him pronouncing Gertes' name, I think is just kind of seared into my frontal cortex now.

What I was going to say earlier is I think this was after I watched Mandy and I saw interview with Nick. Cage and he said he does like he doesn't do acting he does hyperacting which is that some hair saw shit yeah he acts beyond the scene it's not sort of like a stage actor and the thing i really liked that i was trying to get up to earlier is when charlie disappears you know you see the scene where the mom's real mad and she's like don't fucking touch me don't like you you fucked up you lost her time incredible by the way and And usually what would happen is she storms away and he would just look for Lorne. But instead he breaks down sobbing.

And I was like, this is a good move. You never see the dad cry in this. This is this formulae kind of movie. So I was very happy to see that. His hyperacting was good. Yeah. And like one thing that's surprising about this was sort of like the more like psychological elements. Like when he goes in and then she's like at the table and it sort of like kicks in that what has happened is really happened.

that the movie really captured what that feels like really well and then she's like cutting the crust off the sandwich and then i was thinking of the scene of color out of space where she like cuts her fingers off while she's topping carrot so i was really worried that was going to happen and it didn't and then she's like crying with the lunchbox and it's just like very heartbreaking and realistic i was quite impressed it was competent her performance was great his is great um the kid is actually quite a good child actor too i was expecting him to be way overdone. And then when as soon as the psychic lady shows up, it turns into a completely different movie. Woo! We take a left turn. We take a left turn. Left, like, not even, like more than left. It's a completely different movie now.

And so we are amateurs at this analysis of movies. You two have, have the ex-examined. expertise, so I want to know if this is the time we move into the formalism zone. The formalism zone. Let's do it. I do want to out myself as like a closet, structuralist, formalist, just so all this academics are on the same page. Hell yeah. Formalism is back.

It's good again. It's cool. Good. Okay. There's nothing more sexy than good formalism. Good. Okay. Oh, shit.

I forgot I had the Twilight Zone too. Yeah. I always feel bad, like, going to hang out the conferences. I'm like, yeah, I like postmodernism, post-structuralism. They're, yeah, they're great. But I'm going to go over here now. Making my arguments that Derrida is actually a structuralist and all the academics don't like me anymore.

Ash, do you want to kick us off in this exploration through the stacks of the formalism zone? Yeah, totally. I think, like, so I'm really glad you brought this up earlier because, like, Nick Cage's patented mega-acting always gets kind of like, pinned into this weird sphere of like you know we think about mandy when we think about how nick cage acts because it's just like constantly extreme and constantly at 10 but i think like the mega acting in this one is the only way that i could like buy in like this movie would

have been like a d-tier forgettable horror film with anybody else like the fact that like nick cage walks into this world and like 100% makes his character so believable that he's lost his kid and he has to find these ghosts and like all this weird stuff keeps happening and he is so earnest in his exploration of the world around him that like I bought into this movie like this movie was effective I felt for the family like I wanted Nick Cage to succeed at the end I'm like this is so tragic and moving and it's all because of Nick Cage's acting I mean personally I think I think there are essentially two films here okay so there is like a pretty goofy B-movie about an evil, evil ghost lady and the magic ghost children with

ghost powers and a kind of fantasy bridge. Fine, I'm on board with that. And there is also like a searing, slow burn three-hour emotional drama about a family coming to terms with grief. And I'm okay with that. But I think what they decided to do was make both and then condense both into. 90 minutes. And when we introduce our, our, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

something like, something like the HV app, Buster that we talked about back in the day. Buster is real. You can hire your own, you can hire your own exorcist. I was expecting like a midi version of tubular bells to play as she pulled up in the cab. Because it's exactly the same shot. And we, that's, that's, that's the join. that's the point at which these two films are kind of stuck together. And honestly, honestly, there's so much about the back half of the film

that I like less because of what the first half of the film promised to be. Actually, the first 60 minutes, the first two-thirds of the film sets up something that I completely agree with Ash about. But man, do we,

do we, do we suddenly, suddenly and very violently, do we just get bored and decide ghosts, ghosts now? Yeah. like I thought one of the most effective scenes of the movie was and it does get a little goofy but when he thinks he's like hanging up the posters and then thinks he like hears Charlie and like sees him on the bus and he's like running after the bus and then gets on and then all of the people are just staring at him because they're just busy and trying to go about their day and he's like pushing through to the back just to see if his kids there and it was yeah like very just tragic and sad because of course we know Charlie's not going to be there. It's so

haunting, actually, just like the way that he's moving through the world and, like, all his, like, being a sad tenure, like, he got tenure now and what's it for, right? But yeah, no, it's very psychological. And I love how the cops sort of set up that, like, you were the last person to be

seen with him. And so I thought maybe the movie was setting up the sort of, like, is this all in his head? Is he secretly doing something? And then there's all this copaganda stuff instead. I've got a lot to say about the cops in this movie. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Where are we thinking the movie takes the turn? Is it when you get the hire a psychic? Is that it? Or is it afterwards? Because I thought that was a pretty funny thing. It's like, we need to get someone in. And then just the lady rolls up in an Uber. Yeah, I'm done.

Oh, yeah, yeah. My friend Marcy does this. It'll be fine. She'll do it as a favor to me. And this all happens so quickly because I was expecting like a, you know what, I would watch the hell out of Nicholas Cage doing a New York set, Don't Look Now, like, struggling to repair his marriage in the wake of a vanished child. Like, I am there for it. But as soon as our kind of like, the spoon rattles across the table and his wife immediately goes, yeah, you're right, it's a ghost. It's, it's a, everyone is on board with him. The scooter that just scoots itself. Yeah. It was the scooter. I thought. I love that. I loved that.

So the scooters, she was like, oh, I think you're right. Yeah, Ghosts are real. I know the impression of the framing

was that I was going to struggle to believe you, but I tripped over the razor scooter and ghosts are real now. See, I loved that. I loved that. Because it like,

so one, that completely undercut my expectations because the standard plot is like, the kind of beset upon wife is like, honey, you need to move on. You need to let go.

Our child isn't stuck in the ghost dimension. You know, he's dead. And then just literally a haunted razor scooter just hits her in the face while she's on the phone. And it's like, that's, I was like, that's beautiful. And then I'm like a deeper level, though. There's something like this movie's all about tragedy and loss and kind of movement through that space, right? And you, and like, there's like an unexplored quality, I think, in media more broadly, about these kinds of serious personal psychic wounds that's like,

the first half of this movie is how we traditionally conceive these spaces, right? Where it's like you've lost something personal to you and you're taking these grounded steps to try and recover it. You're hanging posters. You're going to the cops and saying like, oh, I googled the sex offender registry and this guy got out of jail right when my son disappeared or something. But then like there's a lot of like idiosyncratic weirdness that happens when you lose someone in your life. You know, there's like, just random goofy nonsense will connect you back into them. And the haunted Razor Scooter is like such a great embodiment of that. Because it's like you encounter these symbolic, affective objects about the person you lost that like, you know one else would be like, oh, the Razor Scooter.

Now I have reawoken this desire to find my child. And this movie connects those things together. And I really like that about the end. up until we get to the ghost children tornado, at which point I absolutely love this movie. I go from enjoying it to loving it, so the ghost tornado is the greatest thing I've ever seen. That is like, I want ghost tornado versus shark tornado. It's all the children or whatever it is, the psychic lady says, and then just gets thrown against the wall. I was just going to say, Charlie, if you're there, do a kick whip.

it's him he tried so off so much and he could just never do it that is our son yeah I love that when when he's like trying to explain to her like I think Charlie's talking to me from the spooky ghost dimension don't haven't you been seeing him and she's like have I been seeing him I see him every single day

like I thought that was just like very vulnerable and honest and that actress I don't know what else she's been in but I found her to be really good and not overselling it. You know, Nick Cage can do the hyperacting, let him do that. And I just thought her, like, yeah, it was just really crushing to me to hear her say all that stuff after, like, we've sort of set up like, oh, we think it's something spooky and psychic going on. And she's like, no asshole. It's just like, yeah, I.

So, yeah, when her turns like, oh, I think you're right. Actually, that was kind of sudden. And then that sets them up for their date night. We've just experienced our son's ghost date night, which I thought was kind of tonally a little weird, but... Our marriage is fixed now. There wasn't any resolution yet. It was just like, let's get some wine, you know.

Everything's good now. I mean, I think it's like, yes, we both believe in ghosts. We've got so much more in common than we've previously thought. And it doesn't matter that you were a bad dad. which is the big unforgivable sin of any horror movie, is to be the capital B bad dad. And it was a little bit weird, which is like,

coming for dinner and maybe some wine. It's like, really? I don't know if that's what has previously happened has set up the atmosphere of like a romantic moment of reconnection. But why not? Why not? As Ash pointed out,

you know, grief is a strange dialectical and often paradoxical state of, being. Yeah, I don't know if I'm like infected with the mega acting virus or something, but like, like that whole sequence, I'm like, why not? Like, you, the, you see, you see like the, the, the, the ghost razor scooter do like a grind across your desk. And then it's like, oh, my husband is 100% correct. There are demon CGI vultures doing graffiti in the city that have stolen my son. I should probably reconnect with him. One thing I found pretty interesting is like, yeah, like, like with the bad dad thing is that it sort of um there's like this big focus on he's focusing more

on his job of like getting tenure and securing that than he is about actually being a home with his family and stuff and he even like says at one part in the film like that's what a father does you know so to protect you know that's what my job is but then there's like no consequences for him like totally ignoring his family to get tenure through the rest of the film. Like it just sets this up as like a tension and then it never goes anywhere. And of course like there's this whole sort of like social conservatism that's like very deeply embedded in a lot of this kind of horror movie where the whole point is to re-inscribe and

reinstore and restore the nuclear family. Right. So the whole point is not it's not like, oh, maybe I need to stop prioritizing my work. The whole point is get the kid back home and then literally children will always fix a marriage. That's how that works. Like that's the whole point, right? The whole point of of being a bad, of not being a bad dad is to basically not just protect your child, but to protect the institution of patriarchal family relationships, right?

Of to reinscribe the correct and appropriate network of relationships into which children have to be kind of assimilated. So this is the thing that we talk about a lot on the show, which is that horror is ambivalent towards the political, right? It doesn't, there is no such, like, intrinsically horror, horror's kind of default state is to be difficult to pin down, which is why critical engagement from the left is so important. So I think even though there's lots, there's so much to talk about with this film,

but that is a kind of part of it, which I think is like, what does this film think fatherhood is? Is it, you know, doing the domestic labor? of family rearing and kind of caring for children. No, it's beating up ghosts. It's beating up ghosts and then taking your son home to his mother because that's the appropriate and correct way that relationship should be ordered.

Yeah, like very early on, so when Charlie's had his little nightmare and then he goes into his mom's room, he'd be like, mom, there's like a thing outside my window. Oh, she said, oh, you're having a nightmare, whatever. And she goes, do you want me to, get it and he goes no I want dad to do it but oh no dad's not there he's off in the weird not library trying to get tenure even though his assumedly his tenure packet has already been

submitted and being reviewed so I don't know why he's working this hard um but yeah like I think I put that in the notes I'm like what kind of weird gender nonsense is happening here when he's like no I need dad to do it not you mom even though you're here yeah and I think like part of this too is that like the kind of one of the lessons of the movie for for lawford is that like the problem wasn't he was over committed to work and ignoring his family it's that he wasn't committed to work enough because he saves the day by by becoming a hyper researcher you know by taking it like it's no longer just this thing he doesn't work and now he does it literally everywhere in every corner of his life and so it's this weird yeah there's a lot of weird

careerism stuff for academics going on in here yeah publish or parish is very real, guys. Yeah, and just like in, on profession in general, like, all of the Halloween costumes we see are all like a type of profession. Like Nick Cage is like a hot, sexy cowboy. The kid's a pirate, but then he's going to be Robin Hood the next year, which is like, fuck yeah, I kid. Go, go you.

All of the other ones, like we see like nurses and like I think there was like an army guy at one point, like a soldier. Like all of the Halloween costumes we see are different jobs. people can have and different roles they can play. So I was thinking what we can do is move on to talking about the representation of the esteemed institution of the New York Police Department in this movie. Because what they are, they are not lazy. If there is one thing, if there's one thing, the police, the NYPD is not, they may be corrupt.

institutionally and systemically racist. Bad at their jobs. Useless, but at least they're trying. Look at this stack of files a few inches high that I just pulled out in my drawer. Right. I did really love that initial scene with the cop at the Halloween party. Because he's just like, uh, what? Did you go home?

And like, I don't know if this was just that like actor or if he was doing this on purpose or something. but he was like, he just looked kind of asleep at the wheel in that role. And I'm like, this is, this is accurate. This is very good. Yeah. My, when my boyfriend and I were watching it, he was just like, that guy is just like not even a cop. He just found a baseball cat that says police on it. I was waiting for that.

I thought that was going to be the bit. I thought he was going to be like, be like, oh, man, I'm just here for the, this is my costume, sexy cop or something. She's a teacher from Bayside. Yeah. No, I thought this was a real lack of accurate representation of the NYPD where when Nick Cage runs up and says, my son is missing and they just beat the shit out of them. Which is what would normally happen. They're like, oh, you're drunk.

Let me throw your face into the pavement. That doesn't happen. And in fact, they get like the specialist child missing investigator out within like a couple hours. and he's like, hey man, don't worry about it. I am a competent black man. I am used by cinema in order to make you think that the police aren't racist. And he's very good at that role, the idea of him. The actor, I don't know.

He is also good at the role. But, yeah, I was reading something not that long ago about the proportion of in TV and media, the proportion of police chiefs who are black compared to, reality and it's just like completely inverted. So that was the that was the copaganda for this episode. But no, like you're totally right. Like this is very propagandistic and especially like the class positioning of Nick Cage's character Lawford is really interesting here because if he is a tenured professor at like

the metaphoric Ivy League school, you know, like he's he's doing okay, right? If he's got this home in this city, right, and he's doing good, like, then the police are going to be very inclined to help him because that's like a defense of class position. That's a defense of these material interests in the social order. Nick Cage is also white. This is a head of a normative family they're defending, right? Like this is re-inscribing social order along these hegemonic and oppressive lines. So it makes sense that they will be like, oh, yes, right away, sir, of course, absolutely, to him specifically. Yeah, and I also love the fact that like

Again, this is maybe because the running time The runtime is so condensed And because there is this Everyone seems to be like very kind of stoic Emotionally speaking right Like the biggest response Biggest kind of police outburst is like Oh, he's back again

Looking for his missing child That we've not been able Does he not know? Look, I have got files in my I look at these every day. I don't do anything, but I do look at them. So it's like everybody and you know, this whole thing of like

oh, go home. Most of this. We'll tie this up in 24 hours. It's fine. There's this kind of very low level of sort of like emotional intensity. And so like not only are the police useless as they are in all horror films, but they genuinely don't seem to

care all that much. Even in our autopsy scene, like where we have a woman who's literally been burned from the outside, from the inside, out. A cop just like, it's weird. That's weird. What? What? Hmm. That seems strange. I better talk to this weird tenured professor who's been bothering me for the last year. Yeah. It's like, well, no, that seems even better because he's just like this very, like, working class looking dude. And he's like, whoa, takes a look at this. He's the dude from Futurama.

He's like, he's like, she's been burns his out. trying to scrub through the movie real quick I see what I can find his face yeah no one no one has ever been more walking here than this guy he is he is

he is very much hey I'm walking here and he's like hey that's a bit weird and like they sort of set up like I feel like there was some B plot cut from this film of the cop

like going all detective on it too because then we get those few scenes of him like he goes to the autopsy scene and then like he goes to um the the woman working at the the chinese restaurant whose daughter had had gone missing and so like he does his own little like information seeking and gathering evidence now he's like oh maybe nick cage isn't actually crazy and annoying like i thought he was like maybe he had a point um and i was like oh it would have been interesting to see like his little journey on this more but then i you know that must have got scrapped but those scenes got left in because they're important.

Yeah. I kept wondering why they didn't just cut his character. I mean, like, this is such a tight movie. And I was just wondering, why isn't that just Nick Cage doing these things? Right,

especially because I set him up with his like Pepe Sylvia Wall and everything. Yeah, yeah. And then even the autopsy scene where the guys like, I need to call Nick Cage. Like, why couldn't that have just been the autopsy tech calling Nick Cage? Like,

oh, there's this goofy academic who's always bothering the police about spooky shit. Maybe he knows about this woman who, you know, like, combust or something. That's why I wanted to bring up the police first because Jay wanted to bring in

information-seeking behavior. So we've got several phases of information-seeking behavior in horror movies, right? So we start off with, he goes to the police. He runs around, can't find him. He goes to the police and has the police say, don't worry, we'll find him. And then we flash forward a year,

and he's been making his own case of databases of missing children. I don't know how you get access to that database as if we as if we track things very well in the world. I have no idea if that sound is me. And then we move to, let's see, what's the next step? He goes back to the police. Police are like, no, you've done all this research, then the medium, right? Well, no. So the way that sort of info seeking in horror tends to go is like you go the sort of like official routes first like the state the institution these like established places that is where you go to for help because that's what we're told and then when in a show they are not good enough they cannot actually help you then you sort of start going it on your

own like that's when you start getting your pepe sylvia wall together and you start you know you are doing the work that the institution and the state have let you down trying to do and that's normally where you get your like sexy micro-fiche scenes and horror movies of like someone scrolling through and looking at like like in the ring where she's looking at through all the headlines and stuff like that's where you get your sexy micro-fiche scenes and then there's always some sort of moment where it's like you realize that you're going to have to sort of cross into the paranormal in a in a horror film if it is a paranormal horror film the paper that my colleague and I really want to write because I've studied a little bit of info-seeking behaviors

but he really wanted to come up that moment as when they cross over into the fantastic of like that is the moment of like when they find that and you never want to believe it, but that's when you go from like point of no return into this is a paranormal thing happening. And so that's when they get

the medium. And then from there there's normally like you think you're on the right track and you think you've got it, but then you don't and it ends up being something else. But they didn't do that little twist in the movie. They didn't do that little twist in the movie. They

just went like, nope, teacher from Bayside and our hot, sexy foreign librarian are going to tell us exactly what we need to know. And then the librarian's going to get thrown, like, yeat it out a window because she has served her purpose and we don't need her anymore because librarians aren't people. What do you think? You know, they're only there to tell us things. And then once we know them, they no longer need to exist. We have Google now, right? So, yeah, that's normally how it goes. It's like the state fails you.

You pepe Sylvia. And then you realize you have to go into unconventional means of the supernatural or the paranormal and sort of let yourself over into that realm. And then that's sort of the trajectory. Like the exorcist is a very, like, pretty good example of this where she goes through like the medical realm first. And then they're like, you might want to get an exorcist as he's sitting there smoking in a doctor's office. Which I always found that scene amazing. But yeah, so that's sort of the trajectory. and then the types of information seeking in this movie,

I found very interesting. Because again, it's normally someone doing a lot of, like, newspaper archival research, or, like, in the show Supernatural, where you get all those scenes of, like, Sam using his, I went to law school skills in old libraries, like, looking in the books. But here's, like, he, like, one of the first things he does

as he goes and talks to the unhoused people with that, like, great guy who plays, like, just the blind man. I don't know if he gets a name, but, like, his performance was all. awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I loved him. So it's like Nick Cage is sort of doing this like very unconventional like personal information seeking. And then when it gets to like the library scene research doesn't happen until we're in the paranormal already, it's talking with the unhoused that sort of brings us into the fact that we need a paranormal expert aspect of it. So I thought

that was quite interesting. It normally sort of the other way around where you find some newspaper article from a million years ago that's like, this thing haunted this town and oh, I better go look into this. But it was like, no, we're just going to skip that. Yeah, I loved how all this is framed to you because I was thinking about the kind of like psychogeographic elements of where information is stored. Yes. If we look at like the map of a city, you know, because he's in the university and the library and

police department, you know, these places where conventionally, that's where we would, you know, like, oh, we want to know something. We have to go look at the document and the document building. And then, like, the whole, like, a hiring an Uber psychic thing, like, that's weird. But if someone were to tell me that, like, oh, I'm using a psychic to find my dead son, that's like, I've seen that on Unsolved Mysteries a million times. That's not, like, shocking. but like the fact that he like goes into this like abandoned sub-basement where all these on house people have their tent city and the way that the movie frames them I think is really interesting because you get like this kind of magic hobob trope a lot right where you have this like unhinged homeless person who is like they've got wisdom but they're also like crazed and so you can't like you can't really get anything from them but no he goes to this. guy and the guy's like oh let me we have we have to go over to like section 2a where we have the pay

the ghost wall being preserved and he just like reads all the information so straight and so clearly and then he's like okay uh your time is up i have a 3 p.m with somebody for the lone ghost department and like he's given such respect by the movie i thought that was really compelling and also um uh shout out to stephen mccati who plays the blind he's credited as the line man. Also, one of the actors in perhaps one of the best zombie films of the past 20 years, because he's in, he's in Pontypool. Oh, yeah. Which is, he's just a great. I'm always pleased to see him pop up. But it's, it's so, it's so interesting that they kind of like, do this so quickly that the idea of kind of like ordering the search for information in what we might take to be

the kind of normative sense just doesn't kind of have time to happen. I genuinely think that this film was edited down really quite brusely. So it feels like, so the kind of causal chain seems to be like, he spots the random graffiti sort of by chance. And it just sort of like, I'm just going to see what's in here. You never know. And there's something about this which like leads it very easily into kind of conspiratorial thinking where you overdetermine or overinterpreted what might be arbitrary signs. And this is one of the weirdest things about kind of of historical research in this film, which is that the archive is 100% complete. The archive is 100% immediately accessible.

And everything fits into the single hermeneutic framework, right? We go, ah, well, that's the Celtic symbol. And so that leads us to this church, which leads us, which we can find by the old map, which is coincidentally, right there. And so it's like, there's this idea of a kind of unified hermeneutic. That is not just kind of localized to institutions, but is like genuinely cosmic. You know, everything, everything meshes together. And it's sort of like, knowledge doesn't work this way.

This is, it's like, oh, this same church has been here for 300 years. And it's like, we have the exact correct map. And we just happened to know that there was a collection. Yeah, all Irish people are Celtic. this is how knowledge works, right? This is how history gets turned into like,

you know, I'll wander into what is clearly like the abandoned basement that they're running the ghost abduction ring out of. It's like, this is, this is, this seems quite weird. Yeah, like there's no wrong information given in this.

Yes. The whole thing about like, so Lawford's wife. carves the like moon phase into her arm and then like they go to like a Wiccan who's having like a Halloween party

and she's like oh no that's the most evil symbol in all of Wicca it means mothers who are bad and I like I was like I was like snapping because I'm like okay like no like this you could buy that at Spencer's gifts this isn't like the hidden world of the occult like this is why you don't listen to Facebook moms who are trying to give you

ghost advice. Yeah, I was like, that is a very common bacon symbol. This is the thing that the movie makes a good joke here, which is she's, they're doing the, the, the, the, the,

the Saw Wayne stuff, which again, no drop kick Murphy's playing in the background. This is unlike any, like, majority Irish American party I've been to. Not even in Danzig, Sam Hain is playing. So they're doing the Saw Wayne thing. They're paying the and then they're like, um, ma'am, could you, uh, uh, high priestess, could you, uh, and she's like,

look, I'm a teacher. I'm just teaching the Bayside. But now, but now, let me just tell you all that exposition that you do need to know, as if it's been handed down for generations. Like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, yeah, I think it's a mark, it's, it's always a mark of an incredibly well-thought-out screenplay to me that when 70 minutes into the movie, you have two, back-to-back scenes that tell you exactly who's done this, why they've done this, and where they are.

That's like, that's, I, like, when you get, when those two scenes arrive, I'm like, there we go. We've just solved the film and now we can relax as we go into the final 20 minutes. Yeah, and like, there was something about that that was like, kind of like darkly realistic, you know, because like, okay, if that, if, let's buy into the movie's logic for a second. Your wife is possessed by some kind of child ghost tornado from Halloween town. And she,

she carves a Spencer's gift necklace into her arm. I would be a little freaked out. I'd be like, okay, I want to know some more, right? And then like, the thing about that that's dark is like, where do they go? Like, they turn to like, this is like the movie's IRL equivalent of Facebook to find out what that symbol means. It's like, oh, that's an evil Illuminati symbol. It means Pizza Gate.

Like don't touch. And like instead of like the the real thing that you would do, like the thing where you would actually get like some grounded meaning of that symbol is you would have to like email like seven different professors, schedule a bunch of really annoying meetings and then have like three competing views about the like various ontologies of how Celtic symbolism has resurfaced in 2015's America, which is way more interesting. But like it's weirdly realistic. way that this movie is like, no, I'm no one. I'm just a teacher. Anyway, here's like a five-page

Facebook post about your arm. Here's why you shouldn't get the COVID-19 vaccine. One thing my boyfriend pointed out when we were watching it was he's like, why didn't they just take a picture of her arm? Like, why does she have to like take the bandage off and like show everyone? Like, look, I did the thing. Why didn't they just like snap a picture on like all their shiny apple products that the movie keeps pointing out to us? Oh, yeah. So the Italian writer Franco Baradi talks about this quite a lot, which is like the overabundance of signification in semioc capitalism. And he says that actually, and he doesn't mean this in a kind of normative or medical sense, but he says the idea of this kind of extended interpretation into a unified whole is a kind of mode of subjectivity.

And it's a mode of subjectivity that is schizophrenic. And it's, and again, not at all in the sense of. of a kind of mental health condition, not used in a medicalized sense, but in a sense of like affect. And it's this idea that the entire universe not only centers ourselves and our own experiences, but all of our experiences are thus connected out

to the entirety of a cosmology and can be interpreted like finally. This is like the whole problem is that our meaning gets away from us so much. Everything becomes interpretable. You know, you spot, you, you hear a, noise and it's it's your dead child you see you see uh graffiti uh in a city and it's your dead child you you hear a child riding riding riding their bike and that's your child so it's like there is something kind of like sort of heartbreaking about the fact that like not only is this

conspiratorial but it's also sort of trapping you you know because not only is it your own experience that's trapped you now 300 years of history has trapped you as well So there's something sort of really, really bleak about that. And it's not just a condition that's shared by our two main characters, but everybody that they meet who goes, yes, you're completely correct. Here, let me continue to kind of pile more intellectual timber on this fire that we've seen in you. And again, Baradi says that this is actually a kind of mode of consciousness that is, all of those shiny Apple products are not incidental, right? How do we get our news?

We get that from the Facebook moms. that we access on our shiny apple products. And we write our, we write our own kind of like metacosmologies on our shiny apple products. It's very, it's very interesting. This is a 2015 film because it's like,

you know, what happens in 2016 in American political culture? Where you have the resurgence of kind of genuine, terrifying conspiratorialism with like Q&ONN becoming real, taking away your children. And isn't your job to protect your children? And what wouldn't you do to protect? protect them? What kind of violence wouldn't you be willing to unleash? So just some thoughts on our

collapsing state of shared political consciousness there to cheer us all up. Yeah, the one thing we did skip briefly with the info-staking behavior was where they start going to the other parents, which I think if they had gone to more parents, that would have been interesting because then they'll be like, oh yeah, my kid was taken by aliens, like obviously. And then I don't want to point out plot holes, but I thought the dad said his kid was abducted two years ago. That's what I thought too. But they saved a kid because, like, we can't not save the kid. I mean, the movie has a happy.

Spoilers, the movie has a happy ending, I guess. Yeah. I mean, the rest of the child ghost tornado doesn't get saved. But, you know, fuck them kids. One thing I thought about interesting about the info seeking with them of the other parents. is the racial and class elements of the other two parents and children that we meet. It's like the other dad who has a kid, like, seems to be maybe a single parent. He is Latino and is having some sort of drug problems now.

It's unclear if those were there before this ruined his life. But then he brings up, it's like, I need money to pay the ghost and, like, brings this, like, class element into it. And the way that this destroys a person and the way that this destroys a person and the way capitalism destroys a person. And then the other parent is a Chinese woman. And I was unclear if she like owned the restaurant she was working in or she just worked there. But yeah. And then like the way that that is sort of manifesting in her space is the second she, they say the word ghost in English, not in Mandarin or Cantonese or whichever language they're speaking. I think it was a Chinese restaurant. Is that the gas flame for the walks just like attacks them all? So I think,

thought it was interesting that the other two sort of families that we see this happen to are in completely different racial and economic circumstances to Nick Cage and his family. I thought that was interesting. I didn't know if it was like up on purpose thing. But yes, I don't know if other people, if y'all had any thoughts about that at all. I totally do because the ghost is a urona, right? Like this, this like, you know, like Mexican ghost tradition of a woman who drowned her children and now is an evil mom. ghost. And so you've got like this weird striation of class through race that goes on in this movie,

that especially when you when you factor in our like, you know, like black American police detective guy who is serving a very ideological and propagandistic role in the text of this film. And then everyone else is just re-inscribing these kind of like, well, of course you have a Chinese American woman. And what is she? She runs a Chinese restaurant, of course. What else are they going to do? You know, and then like the way that it just kind of like can very conveniently slots everything together, I think is one of the darker aspects of this film. Yeah, like it both feels like almost lazy and tropish, but also realistic at the same time. It's like both of those spaces. It felt like their way of saying, hey, we're in New York City. Remember how we're in New York City?

This is how people live in New York City. Totally not Toronto. I think that's the most they thought about it, honestly. That's how it fell. But you did say that this is from the guy who did one of the Bader Meinhuech Complex movies, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I wonder if I've seen that Bader Mejof movie. I studied some German film in college. I'm like, oh, I wonder if I've seen that one and have to look it up. Yeah, so I thought that was interesting, and that those are the two children that are rescued at the in. And it cage just kind of has to look at all these other ghost tornado children. I'm sorry. I was so expecting him to drop those kids

With the last minute I wasn't sure they were going to make it man Fuck them kids just Drop them kids the movie I wanted him to walk out with like 30 Like 100 years worth of ghost children And be like Mama Mia I have an orphanage now or something

Like that would just be fantastic Oh yeah Charlie's gonna need an individualized instruction plan now Like he's a year behind He has a Mesaia he has no idea that he's ear in the future. And how are you going to tell that to your kid too? Like, oh, here's why you can't be with your friends in school. You got ghost kidnapped for a year.

Yeah, it's like, so you go to work the next day. Oh, Nicholas Cage, how was your weekend? It's like, yeah, no big deal. The ghost of the Bider-Meynhoff gang kidnapped my child for a year and then a tornado made out of Halloween children. Okay, I genuinely, I genuinely, I, genuinely do have one one minor thing I would like to bring up about the ending. And actually about our villain, which is that this, this has frustrated me ever since it

was brought up. So Gertes's, uh, Earl Koenig is referenced in red. And I was like, I was so, and for people who've not read it, it's a very, very famous poem. It was set to music by Schubert. And it is, is kind of what's a prototypical or a prototype of what would become German opera. It's a great Gothic story about the king of the woods who steals children. And the child ends up dead in its father's arms. They ride through the forest at night. It's amazing. And I was like, there is no need, like 50, 60 minutes into this film to invent a brand new villain.

We could have just had like a super, like the setup was there right at the beginning that we're talking about, we're talking about Gerta. And I was sort of like, it would be really cool. if any of Nicholas Cage's expertise as a scholar of literature paid off. He talks about Lovecraft, he talks about Washington, Irvin, and he talks about Goethe. But instead, we have this weird pivot

into paganism, into Celtic religions. And I'm like, you didn't need to invent this new idea because really, the Earl Koenig does the same thing. and you don't need to have this kind of tragic backstory of like murdering children. You can have a genuinely supernatural entity that wants to take away life.

So is it just me that's annoyed that this wasn't a Gerta inflected Nicholas Cage movie? Because I would have lived. Yeah, because I was like, oh, obviously this is, it's going to be spooky, uh, that's going to be the, and then nope. another thing I found interesting about that scene that I think especially with like his skill as a scholar talking about these things because like I want to take a spooky ghost course with Nick Cage that sounds awesome is that in that first like Indiana Jones you know it's classroom singing from hocus pocus scene that we get at the beginning one of the the way that he ends it is that like and so as you go out tonight think of lovecraft think of Gerta think of all these people who create create these stories. Like he sets up like, oh, yeah, this, you know, this is an amazing story. It's great.

And I forget if one of the students, like, asks about something about it, I don't even remember. But then he makes sure that he focuses on like the, that, you know, people create these tales and write them and provide them for us. And so I was honestly surprised that, like, you know, he didn't have this. And then surprise these stories were actually real, whoa, or have to use any of his research at all when the point. was thank the people who wrote these stories for you was set up there as well.

And there's like this weird disconnect that's kind of happening too, because you've got like Dyrtha who's in there, but Po, Irvin and Lovecraft, these are all New England specific writers. Yeah. They're all, I mean, like, Lovecraft is horribly rooted in New York, but the rest of them at proximity to the city. Like, there's something here that, like, is 100% attempting to weave this kind of historic connection into literature and material locations and the stories we tell.

And then, yeah, they just like, that for me is the big swerve where like they keep setting up something. And then, and then I think he's, I think he's a professor because who else would be in a library ever? You know, like, like, that's the excuse for his character, you know? And it would have made so much more sense that like the plot would have, like, uh, a German, Lutheran immigrants coming to America, this whole thing of like, well, there's only one Irish Celtic building left. It just feels very, very weird. And, you know, given, given that we're going for this

kind of like, it's from a German director as well. So I would be like, it would be very cool to have like a kind of campy, high energy B movie where we talk about Germanic and North European romantic era literature and folklore. That would have been cool. I would have been so on board with that. But instead we get this genuinely deeply upsetting bit of history where a woman and her children are burned to death for spreading the flu or spreading influenza,

which post-COVID hits a little bit different. And we forget about this kind of rich legacy of actually existing Gothic and horror writing. And instead kind of fob the audience. off with this kind of poor excuse. Yeah, there's something, another thing about this that I think is kind of interesting is there's something about this that is almost hemmed in by colonialism, right? Because who are the foundational tellers of the stories that define New England,

white settlers, right? Like those are the people that are referenced. And what is the ancient story that inspires everything? It's Gertha, right? Like the history of this land doesn't go to the peoples who were genocided, right? The indigenous American communities. It goes back to Europe. It goes back to the colonialist forces.

And I think that that is something this movie could have absolutely navigated and focalized, you know, Poe and all of that stuff. But I think in the way that this movie frames it, there's this weird dissonance that's going on. Yeah, especially because I think it almost tries to do that a little. little bit and that it, not just that they were spreading the flu, but that for their pagan beliefs and that they weren't Catholic, like everyone else are Protestant. I forget exactly, you know, who was, like it's almost, it sets it up as almost like a witch trial, like hysteria kind of thing, but it's like, yes, they were splitting the fruit, but also they were evil pagans, whoa, and that the children were pagans too and doing little goofy rituals in their

secret hidden basement. So, yeah, like it almost felt like it was trying to go, and obviously not and like the actual like, let's talk about the people we genocided to get here. Yeah. But this sort of like oppression of non-dominant belief. And then it just does nothing with. Yeah, and they re-inscribe it at the end too with the whole like triple goddess symbol. Like, like, so you, if you go to Barnes & Noble, you're going to see that symbol. You know, it's literally just stamped on every third thing.

It's so common. And the fact that the movie is like, oh, no. That's the crone. Yeah. Like, like that was just maybe lazy. is the term I want to use for that one. You could have at least dug up like a demonic sigil or something a little bit spoofier.

Yeah, and especially, did they also find the symbol in any of the like archival documents that the sexy, not librarian was looking at? Or, yeah, I even just watched this, like, rewatched it Friday. I don't remember if they saw the symbol in those writings as well. Because, yeah, they were sort of like looking at like the digital collection. And Justin, did you ever find out,

my software that was. No, I think it's something we used to run at USF, but I don't think it's, I think that version's long gone. Yeah, because like they were looking in there. And then, when she gets yeated out the window, it's, she's been looking at things, like, physically on a magnifying glass. Yeah, so I don't even remember if the symbol was in there. But they could have done some, like, deep, like, we have to go into the archives and the historical research for some other symbol and not just the triple goddess, which everyone knows about. And again, this is, this is what I mean when I say that, like, Nick Cage films happen in a kind of, like, cross-dimensional void, because this is, this is not, this is not

what academia is. This is, this is not how any of this works. This is, but what it is, is a collection of aesthetic signifiers, which read to, to people who do not work or kind of have much connection with higher education as kind of tonally appropriate. It's like if this was an underemployed adjunct instead of someone who's desperately trying to get tenure and can't get into the library because for some reason the fucking ID badge doesn't work anymore,

you know, there would be a chance because it's like, what this does is it kind of reifies a vision of what academia is into the popular political and cultural imagination, right? Or academia is about those fancy buildings and librarians with interesting, specifically non-American accents, getting yeated out of the plate glass,

and it's always about old maps which are right there on hand whenever you need them, and infallible information systems that will immediately respond with what a visual image might be. And it's like, yeah, it kind of feels correct, but this is not really, it, it happens in a place like a university maybe like 60 years ago.

It doesn't actually have. So really, this is why I have not referred to Nicholas Cage by his character's names, because really it's just Nicholas Cage, right? That's who is in this movie. And it's like, it would have been, it would be really interesting to see an attempt to kind of challenge this hegemonic vision of what academia or higher education really, is in the cultural imagination, but it's still ensconced in ivory towers and tweed and desperately trying to get tenure and and having flawless systems that work perfectly and

information that is immediate and complete and never contested and never challenged and never fragmentary. But I don't know. I guess maybe we're not with that that isn't something that is present yet. Yeah, whoever brought up the sort of like dark academia aspect, I think that's spot on and that it's all these signifiers and especially in a more gothic sense of you know the the tweet and the ancient university and scholars of things that no one else cares about except that scholar and that information is going to save you and stuff that's like you know i love don't it heart and i love dead poet society but i'm like shaking my fist of them for forever but yeah where it's like it's not about anything like the purpose of going to college or studying these things

it's all aesthetic. And so yeah, like, I hadn't thought about that while watching the movie just because I was just like trying to pay attention and like remember things. But why was he a professor? Yeah. Why was any of this like it seems so disconnected and just these like signifiers that are there? But what are they even supposed to be signifying? What role are they even supposed to be playing? Because it's obvious that they're there to be aesthetic signifiers.

And not just what, but like why are they? even there when it has nothing to do with anything else? And we get this, we get that one, there's this one brief scene that I think is so interesting for this part of the discussion where it's, it's after he's lost his son, because before he's lost his son, he's the Ivy League,

about to be tenured, you know, the definition of a successful academic. And then after he loses his son and he's like, blearily going on to a bunch of asleep students, it's like clear that that didn't work out for him, You know, and now he looks like he's in like an inner city community college because it's the classroom with like a bunch of asleep students. It's tiny.

It's got like the popcorn ceiling. It's got all those things from like, you know, like how we would visually signify a lesser school. And then like, but there's no like that never reconnects back into the movie. You know, it never, it's like, oh, I've lost access to the university. I can no longer go to like the arcane book room at Harvard and. read the lore or something, you know? And like, there's never a moment where he's like, I really want to do this research, but I have like five courses this semester, 40 students each. They're all English 101. So he has to mark like 700 papers of garbage in a weekend. And so it's

missing this kind of material connection to like, it's, what it's doing. It's propagandistic, right? It's feeding into this myth that if you work in academia, you like, I don't know, talk about books and get paid a billion dollars to do literally nothing while. five students clap. It is like the mythology that's being worked by this film. And then for what purpose? It doesn't even connect to the rest of the plot. Yeah.

It doesn't really matter that this is, Nicholas Cage as a researcher, right? It doesn't really matter. But it does matter that it's Nicholas Cage in the kind of aesthetic trappings of an academic because here's a kind of slightly wild theory that the whole purpose, of this is to suggest then a kind of universalism of Nicholas Cage.

Like, he isn't just a hyperactor, but Nicholas Cage is literally everything. He's lit, like, he can steal cars, he's an academic, he's a motorcycle, like, anything that, that you need him to be. He is the kind of ultimate plastic subject that can just be molded into the right space, narratively speaking. So I think we have found with this and our episode on Mandy a kind of compelling theory of, you know, Nicholas Cage is liquid subject. Like he can just, he's sort of like,

you know, the liquid metal terminator. There is no, there is no like singular unitary Nicholas Cage. He is, he is rhizomatic and cosmic. Yeah, and that's an interesting point because the,

the fact that the hot for librarian lady is like blonde and vaguely non-American. Like that's the same thing that's a national treasure with Diane Kruger's role. And then he's like looking up information and these like antiquated systems and about old things. I'm like, is this just supposed to be spooky national treasure? I kept thinking that. This whole movie, I was like, how does this slot into the National Treasure cinematic universe?

Exactly. Because she's obviously just supposed to be like the Diane Kruger like sort of surrogate of this film. I kept waiting at some kind of like wink to the audience, because this is so similar to his character in National Treasure and what happens in National Treasure. It's the exact same thing, but like go subduct his children instead of he has to like defeat Ben Franklin's legacy to find gold or something. I kept waiting for him to be like, oh, this reminds me at that time I found that map or something. But no, no, the movie never acknowledges the truth of the text of the film. what do we think of at the end the little stinger two seconds into the credits they don't even make you wait of the sexy not diane kruger library and being like impaled on all of these uh anti bird spikes um and then having the the evil ghost tornado vultures like picking at her and then her eyes open back up like what do we think of this i love that i think that's ultimately a very bold meta commentary on like the way we do architecture in cities, you know, those spikes, the spikes exist to scare away

nature, right? It's a way to re-inscribe this anthropocentric domination. And here we have a human who is dead being picked apart by like the cosmic representation of the power of the thing that should have been warded off by these spikes. Maybe that's something we could do with that if we want to like lose our minds a little. No, I was actually thinking the same thing of like, oh, their anti-bird spikes that she's on and then it's the evil ghost children vultures. And then setting up a sequel? I don't know. Like, is that what they were trying to do?

Like, and now it's going to be the evil sexy not librarian. And she's the ghost. You have to pay for some reason. You have to pay the library funds. You have to pay like your library fines. Otherwise, you'll take your children. Which, speaking of which New York Public Library just got rid of, of all library of fines and forgave all of them for everything.

Awesome. Yay. Shout out to NYPL. But I do admire the directorial or production confidence to have watched the complete edit of Pay the Ghost starring Nicholas Cage and then go, yeah, this is getting a sequel. We need a better. Like, I want to have that confidence in my day-to-day professional life, right, to look at work that I've done. and go, not only is this good, it's so good, they're going to ask me for more of it. You know what? You know what? Going forward, I am now going to do post-credits teasers in every article and book chapter I write. Just write in the citations, I'm going to have a Stinger chapter for the next forthcoming work I'm doing just to continue the spirit that we're living today.

Just do full house of leaves for everything you write about. I mean, that's, that isn't that book like a horror statue? tire of academia anyway. Just go full hustle leaves on it. Oh, yeah. But I do I do have to run in a bit here. So I don't know what we wanted to do. I don't know how long the episodes

usually are on your end. Usually an hour. Yeah. So we have paid our ghost, I think. We won't have people in really bad Halloween costumes that my boyfriend didn't think was the main villain until it showed up again coming after us. and pointing at us.

Did you want to plug anything in particular because I'm going to put all of your Twitter and video links, anything people should be looking forward to? Our continuing Halloween spooky season episodes, you get New Horror Vanguard at least once a week, sometimes twice a week,

so make sure to follow, like, share, and subscribe and pay the ghost by signing up for our Patreon page. Oh, yes. I did a laugh track. Oh, that's, oh, chef's kiss. These drops have been God tier, by the way, so thank you for doing those. Yeah, please do check out HV, wherever you get your podcasts from. We've just completed a full retrospective of the Saw franchise.

We suffered mightily to entertain you all. I am The Liquit Guy and pretty much everything. I'm working on a couple of new YouTube videos, which will be out just in time for spooky season, one of which will be featuring the incredible talents of my co-ghost and HV producer Ash. And other than that, please do find us on Twitter at Daravania and at The Liquit Guy.

But thank you so, so much, both of you. Yeah, thanks for coming on. I've really been looking forward to it. And so good night. Thank you.