Radiolab - Quicksaaaand!

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear — it held a vise grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. But these days, quicksand can't even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we try to find out why.  Then-Producer Soren Wheeler introduces us to Dan Engber, writer and columnist for Slate, now with The Atlantic. Dan became obsessed with quicksand after happening upon a strange fact: kids are no longer afraid of it. In this episode, Dan recounts for Soren and Robert Krulwich the story of his obsession. He immersed himself in research, compiled mountains of data, met with quicksand fetishists and, in the end, formulated a theory about why the terror of his childhood seems to have lost its menacing allure. Then Carlton Cuse, who at the time we first aired this episode was best-known as the writer and executive producer of Lost, helps us think about whether giant pits of hero-swallowing mud might one day creep back into the spotlight.And, as this episode first aired in 2013, we can see if we were right.   Episode Credits:Reported and produced by Soren Wheeler Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail].     Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

Hey, it's a lot to, when many of us were younger, TV and movies were full of moments where some hapless character would be walking along in some new exotic place, they'd take a wrong step, and then they'd just start to slowly get slurps down into the earth. Quick-sand was in so many movies, and it makes total sense to why, right? Like the sucking, sinking, inevitable drawn outness of it. That's just universally terrifying, right? Turns out, nope. In 2013, journalist Dan Engber pulled our editor, Soren Wheeler, into his obsession with QuickSand, and it's surprisingly deep resonance is through history. What it all reveals is that what we fear and how we articulate those fears are a lot more shifty and sandy than you might think. So now for no other reason than that we wanted to,

we're playing that episode for you again. Quick-sand! Enjoy. Yeah, you're- Wait, you're listening. Okay? Alright. Okay. Alright.

You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio. From... W and Y. Six! Eight! Three... Why?

Hey, I'm Chad Abumron. I'm Robert Crowley,ley. This is Radio Lab. We do have an interesting podcast for you. We do indeed. Soren Wheeler is standing by because he and I had a conversation with someone we can just guess. Yeah, do you want to do it? Do you want to carry it? Sure. Do it. So today we have a story of an obsession that swallowed reporter Dan Engber pretty much whole. Yeah. Of all the things to catch your attention, how did this happen to pop into your head? It happened to pop into my head because I was talking to a friend of mine who's an elementary school teacher, and we were discussing QuickSand as one does. Oh, of course.

This elementary school teacher and I, and she just said, you know, the kids in my class just don't even, they've never heard of QuickSand. Like, second graders, they're great, like what? Nine-year-olds. Nine-year-olds, we're great, right? That's fourth grade. That's prime time for QuickSand. Right, when I was nine, QuickSand was a major part of my life.

Yeah, we would, you know, pour water in the corner of the sandbox and say, oh, it's quicksand. But your teacher, friend's students didn't. Right. So I went to her, I visited her class. I might discover that she was wrong. Almost all of them had heard of quicksand. But she was right in so far as quicksand was not important to them.

In fact, they thought it wasn't scary at all. I was like, well, what are you afraid of? And they said, you know. Zombies, the alien, the emphatic rim goes. When I was actually lost in writing, I'd be attacked by a dinosaur. That would be totally more scary. So we actually went and talked to some third graders.

And while some of them said, well, I guess it's sort of scary, but. Most of them weren't scared of it at all. I don't think so. I usually don't think about it. They thought it was something that maybe their parents had been afraid of. They told me that when he was little, his friends always said, like, look out, that could be quicksand.

They would say people used to be scared of that, but it's not scary anymore. So that got me to thinking, what happened? Why is QuickSand not scary the way it used to be? And with that simple question, Dan got sucked into a world he never even knew existed. So the next step was going to the internet and within a minute I discovered the QuickSand fetish community. A quicksand fetish. Yeah. Like fetish fetish, like sex fetish? Yes. Oh.

So then... So among the quicksand fetishists, there are so-called sinkers. These are people who seek out quicksand in nature and want to jump in. With another person and kiss or or buy themselves with no clothes on or raise the sex part. Some of them buy themselves with no clothes on or ways to the sex part.

Some of them buy themselves with no clothes on. Some smaller group with another person that they can convince their partner to come with them. But they always have a rope with them, I hope. Oh yeah, oh, if you go on to the sinker's message boards, there's a Google map which has sinking spots all over the world and each one is rated for, you know, thickness, depth, privacy, available parking nearby. I mean, it's a really, it's like a very thought through and wonderfully collaborative community.

So there's synkers in one hand and then there are the watchers. They just want to see people where animals sinking into Quixand. So they'll watch movies and just find the Quixand sequence in the movie. And here's where Dan sunk even deeper. Because he discovered that one of these watchers, the sky crypto had in the course of his fetishistic Quixand watching collated this list of well

over a thousand quicksand scenes and film and television. There were scenes going all the way back to the birth of filmmaking. I mean this is the greatest impetus for scientific research. Try out a take off your shoe and patle you. If you queue up with like a fetishistic interest in the data. And Dan thought maybe this data can give us a clue about how the way we think about QuickSand has changed. So I went through and I pulled out every feature film from the list. And then with information from the MPAA,

I figured out how many movies were being released every decade and then I sort of computed a, like what percent of movies had Quixand in every decade? Going back to the first Quixand movie they have is from 1909. It's a silent film where a woman gets rescued from quicksand by some hooded muck. So I'm unable to find this movie,

but I'd love to see it. I don't know what it's about. But anyways, I started looking at the number of movies by decade and beginning of the century, it's like one in a thousand movies. By the thirties, it's up to one in 500, and then in the 40s, one in 200. And then in the 1960s, all of a sudden, it just shoots up. Like one in 35, like almost 3% of Hollywood movies have QuickSand.

The 1960s are just clearly a moment for Quixant. And Dan says, it wasn't just the number of films. The Quixant scenes that showed up in the 60s were serious, dramatic scenes. For example, Lawrence of Arabia, where Peter O'Dool is, you know, pushing through the dust storm to try to save his companion, who's being sucked under. That movie won seven Oscars. And then, women in the dunes came out. This, like, art see Japanese existentialist meditation. And for about the next 10 years, Dan says,

you had all these serious films that featured Quixan. And then it fell off dramatically. In the 1970s, it's already fallen to something like one out of 75, and then by the 1980s, it's like one out of 130. And then in the 90s, Quixand is mostly gone. Huh. And I think also in the 80s, it had migrated into...

Belly, help! Television. I'm stuck in Quixand. Boy, you have a one bad day. Larry and Balke and Perfect Strangers are falling into Quick Sand. There's Quick Sand in My Little Pony. There's Quick Sand in Rainbow Pride. I mean, it's Zany Quick Sand.

Basically Dan says, Quick Sand had become a joke. And so, and that's the end, I think, when quicksands in Saturday cartoons. I think I do think that adventure kegs probably have a lifespan. So just for a gut check, Dan and I decided maybe we should run this past somebody who knows the business. I'm Carlton Cues and I'm a television writer and producer. And Carlton was actually the showrunner for the TV show Lost. And that's a show that by rights should have tons of quicksand.

I mean, they should be in quicksand all the time. They're stranded on a tropical island. It's an adventure show. But according to Carlton, whenever one of the writers would say, you know, okay, so Kate goes running down a path and then all of a sudden she falls into a pit of quicksand. The rest of them would be like, um, I don't know if we can really pull that off. So what is that? Like what is it that would make that not you know I just think a lot of people

would sort of be rolling their eyes and not not buying it. I know it sounds it sounds kind of crazy because you know here you are making sort of a crazy show with smoke monsters and polar bears and time travel and for someone to say no no no but we don't believe QuickSand. I know, it's... But ultimately, you just sort of trust your gut. And just right now, where QuickSand is just not, sort of, I think, the right metaphor for how we're all feeling. But in the 60s, it was. Has someone speculated as to the reason why in the 60s? Oh, I've speculated at great length.

I mean, it's a fascinating moment because it's not just in movies I believe that this nation should commit itself So we're planning the moon mission in the early 60s and a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth and this Cornell astronomer named Thomas Gold has what if when the Apollo lander descends to the surface of the moon it just sinks into a lunar quicksand. I remember the same thing. I remember Tom Goldstein, that too.

Yeah, so right at this golden moment of quicksand, people are discussing real life quicksand on the frontier of that era. Now is the time. And then 1963 Martin Luther King Now is the time. Makes us, I have a dream speech. 63 Martin Luther King, makes us I have a dream speech. He says now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice. And then I came here to speak to you about Vietnam. There was Vietnam. I do not have to tell you that our people are profoundly concerned

about that struggle. You know, we now think of Vietnam as having been a quagmire. That's the rhetoric that's used now, but the debate in the 60s between Daniel Ellsberg and Arthur Schlesinger, they use quicksand and quagmire interchangeably. They just, Ellsberg will switch off in one essay. He'll call it a quicksand and then a quagmire. But the They just, Elberg will switch off in one essay. He'll call it a quicksand and then a Quagmire. But the first use of that idea was to describe it as a quicksand and then it kind of migrates from being a quicksand to a Quagmire

over the course of the late 60s and early 70s. And now, I mean, more evidence, now we call it a Quagmire. We forgot that Vietnam was a quicksand before it was a Quagmire. So on all of these levels, quicksand before it was a quagmire. So on all of these levels, quicksand is just, you know, is part of these key moments of this 1960s. So the question that, you know, that was just, I was obsessed with for a long time was, why did America fall into quicksand in the 1960s? I mean, did it come out of the movies and suddenly everyone's

talking about it or was everyone talking about it? And so maybe everybody saw Lawrence of Arabia and they all went back to their jobs somewhere on rocket ship jobs and somewhere on Warfie Warrior jobs and they all just carried Peter O'Toole in their heads as possible, I suppose. That's possible. Who knows? My sense is that it's had to do with just sort of a generalized anxiety about going some place radically new. Angusiety about, you know, the hubris of traveling to the moon. Anxiety about social upheaval.

Anxiety about the foreign entanglement of Vietnam and the state of geopolitics. But why would that those anxieties manifest themselves in terms of like quicksand? I think it's this idea that you're going to get sucked in, you're going to go too far, you're going to get stuck in whatever new world you've ventured into. And right now there isn't that anxiety of exploration anymore. I mean, Quixand in Shakespeare's time was always off the coasts of new continents. It had to do with the age of exploration. And then it became desert Quixand,

a jungle Quixand during colonial era. And I just think the world is... And then it became the moon. Yeah, and then it became the moon. And... Well, look at all the real estate that's beyond the moon, come on. And I mean, you got like our solar system, you could have the quick stand of Jupiter.

Yes, absolutely. I think if we're gonna land humans on some- Black holes. Isn't black holes a kind of quick stand? Yeah, this is my guarantee. If we're about to land humans on some planet, beyond the moon, these thoughts of Quicksand would re-emerge.

Oh, yeah. This is Carlton Cues again. And now we're going to see this whole new chapter of Star Wars. And clearly what? It just so happens that the director, JJ Abrams, is working on a whole new Star Wars movie. Yes. And I think in the context of some strange new world, I think the audience would totally buy QuickSand there.

Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. Yeah, so I'll shoot JJ an email and just say, QuickSand, and just leave it at that, see what happens. Just a quick note, since we did this story, the new Star Wars films have come out and in fact, in one scene, an entire spaceship, a typhoider to be precise, sinks into the sand on a planet called Jakku, where apparently there's a whole region called the sinking fields. Nima outposes that way.

Stay off Kelvin Ridge. Keep away from the sinking fields and the north field drown in a sand. So, there you go. Thank you, sir. Thanks, Erin, yeah. No problem. Don't follow me. Town is that way. Radio Lab was created by Jod Abhamrad and is edited by Soren Neuler. Lulu Miller and Lafteth Nir are our co-host. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer.

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