The Big Picture - The Best Movie of 2021 So Far, and a Chuck Klosterman Theory of Film

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Sean and Amanda welcome author Chuck Klosterman to dive deep into two fascinating topics. The first is Adam Curtis' sprawling six-part documentary series 'Can't Get You Out of My Head,' which explores the absurdity of modern life and the intersections of power, drugs, culture, and the future of civilization (0:30). Fun times. Then, Chuck poses a radical theory of movie watching, which leads to a conversation about the multiverse and the value of biopics (46:30). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chuck Klosterman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ringer Dish is the place for all things celebrity. From major celebrity moments like the Met Gala and the Oscars, to the weird habits of the stars you love, to refreshers on the biggest tabloid stories from the last 20 years, Ringer Dish has all the vital details. On Tuesdays, catch Jam Session with Juliette Lippman and Amanda Dobbins for royal family rumors, celebrity real estate, and industry analysis. And on Fridays, listen to Tea Time with me, Kate, and Amelia

for lightning-fast coverage on pressing celebrity news and gossip. Check out Ring Your Dish on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the uncontrollable fate of human life. Today, we are talking about two fascinating and perhaps somewhat related phenomena. The first is the British documentary maker Adam Curtis and his new eight-part series, Can't Get You Out of My Head, which listeners in America can listen to on YouTube. Then, our guest will share a wild theory of movies. And that guest is someone we are delighted to welcome, an old friend to The Big picture for the first time, Chuck Klosterman. Chuck, how are you?

I'm good. Perfect. Perfect? Wow. I'm all right. I'm okay. That was not so enthusiastic. You were so much sunnier. Well, you know, it's great to be here. Chuck, you might be bringing the right energy to this show because we have two things we want to talk about with you today. One of them is the filmmaker Adam Curtis and his new documentary series, which premiered on the BBC, but is available to people in America widely

on YouTube illegally, I suppose, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for Adam Curtis. Is it illegal? Because I was shocked that it was immediately available. I thought I had to subscribe to YouTube or something. Or is it because his anti-capitalist take demands that he says this has got to be distributed for free? I honestly do not know the answer to that question. Amanda, what is your theory about why this is available? Well, I thought that I was watching it on his official YouTube channel.

Was that his not? That's not. That's just someone who's, well, that's fitting for an Adam Curtis project. So now I'm just embarrassed and I don't know. Chuck, before we get too far into how we saw this thing, can you help listeners understand who Adam Curtis is and what this new film is? It's called Can't Get You Out of My Head, for those of you who are interested in watching it. What is it? Who is he? Well, you know, I did not know that much about him until this series came out. I had not realized

at all that one of my favorite things ever was this TV series called a century of self which was on the bbc like 20 years ago i didn't know that was him like i i had watched this it was a was like a tv series in some ways similar to this but not nearly as sort of expressionistic or whatever you know but it was like a basically like a look at the 20th century through the idea of how psychology has been used to sort of change advertising and change our understanding of politics and all these things. It was this real great thing. I was still living in New York. They played it in one of like the small theaters. And I would go see these various episodes.

What it turns out, this is the same guy and who he is, is basically, I guess somebody who was a standard kind of documentarian. And then at some point had this shift where he was like, I think documentaries should be more like an experience where I don't necessarily tell you what my thesis is, but you're just supposed to absorb all these different images and this use of music to sort of come to a pretty sweeping conclusion about how life is. And his fundamental argument in all that he does now in some way seems to be, and this is, I think, a somewhat controversial idea. He's like against individualism,

which is just not an idea people tend to express. I mean, we're pretty conditioned to assume that things that promote individualism are good. And he is very much against it. I mean, he might say, oh, I'm not really against the individual, but he is. I mean, his fundamental idea seems to be that as people have become more separate from each other and sort of allowed to be the individual that they desire, that it has made it easier for institutions of power to control them because they are less likely to join a union or join a political party or basically in any way work with people who have, in theory, similar needs

or, you know, that their goals should be the same. But he does it in this very, I mean, I don't know. In some ways, it seems like he is influenced by like what MTV was in the 1980s. I mean, I don't think he would agree with that. But I think in some ways it is because it's like, well, you see a piece of something, you see a piece of something, you see a piece of something. None of them are connected, you know, in any kind of tangible way. But if you keep piling these things up, you just sort of have a feeling or an atmosphere, you know? And I mean, I don't know. It's like,

there's only a few things during the pandemic that I've really enjoyed watching. This is the top, like this is the best thing I have seen during the pandemic. I wish it was on 12 hours a day and I could just sit and watch it, you know? And, and I, it's, so I mean, I don't know. You might have more insight on who this guy is because I didn because, like I said, I don't know his biography. I don't even know what he looks like. I don't know what his appearance is.

I don't know how old he is. I'm very familiar with his work. The reason I wanted to talk about this at all is because I heard you on the rewatchables ask Bill Simmons if he had seen this film. And I don't think that he had seen this. And I don't know if he knows who Adam Curtis is. But, you know, I don't have a long history with him.

I hadn't seen Century of the Self when it came out. I did see Hypernormalization, which is a film that he released in 2016. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that, though. After I started watching this, I went and watched Hypernormalization, which is, in some ways, very similar,

although it's shorter. It's only 40 years, and it's not nearly as abstract. Yes. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, I think essentially the reason there's a lot of attention going on to him, and I want to hear from Amanda too,

because I basically compelled her to watch this, and we never really even had a conversation about it, is he is a documentarian and journalist who is evolving in real time into a kind of micro celebrity in this space and someone who clearly fashions himself a true artist, a true filmmaking artist. He has a definitive and distinct style. Last week, Amanda and I talked about the Snyder cut and how regardless of what you think about the ideas that Zack Snyder has, he has a vision. Adam Curtis is oddly in the same mold. He is a person who has a very clear archival and music-oriented approach

to telling stories and using those stories to basically sell his philosophical ideological premises, the ones that you're talking about. So Amanda, I don't remember how long ago it was that I asked you, but I basically said what Chuck just said. I was like, this is the best thing I've seen in months. I loved it. I would love to talk with you about it. Will you watch it? And you said yes. And you didn't complain. You didn't, you were just like, I'm in. So what'd you think? Because I liked it because I have a brain and because I think enjoy is an interesting choice of verb to describe this experience, not because I don't think it's like incredibly engaging and accomplished, but because of the emotions that it evokes. And it's, you know, it's supposed to, I believe, like the subhead is like an emotional history of the world.

And it creates, I would say at a times unnerving experience, but certainly an immersive experience that, you know, sometimes just stress me out. I think I just deal with emotions in the world differently than you guys do. And that's beautiful. And it's why we're all here together. But I was really compelled by it. And I did watch all eight hours of it, which for me is a triumph.

Chuck, I didn't know very much about Adam Curtis either. I was like, I think I've seen parts of hyper normalization, which is like, again, like really fitting when you think about it. And also I was kind of meme aware because there is like, if you search online, there's like a bingo card now that, you know, you can, no one's actually playing it, but it's a joke on like the very specific style and the types of motifs that he relies on. And there is like an emerging Twitter meme of like a thing that happens and someone's like

adam curtis narration and oh well i know i i've seen that on twitter and i and i i i'm not i wasn't sure these people who are sort of does that prove that they love it or are they mocking because i see a lot this is that it's this adam kurd's narration the way he narrates for some reason they think is fitting for whatever they're attempting to get across but my assumption is that this is the kind of thing like it's not mass like it's not like like mass populist thing it would seem to me anybody who would know who this guy is would probably be if they don't like it at least think it's interesting i mean right no i think it's done like it's a film twitter in joke and it's a little bit to show that you're in the know and like

you've consumed all of his thoughts about technology and like the fake world and are and are also able to narrate it. And it is also, but born of affection and thinking that it at least has worth. I think so because like, why else would you spend this much time, um, watching this thing? It's pretty dense. So I do think it is affectionate, even if it's like a little bit wry. And I think it does suggest kind of the, that perhaps people who are watching it receive it slightly differently than he does. And like,

whether it's art, whether it's journalism, whether it's serious, whether it's, you know, I mean, it's not sarcastic, um,

whether it's optimistic or pessimistic is a really interesting conversation that I'd like to have with both of you, because he is on the record saying it's optimistic or pessimistic is a really interesting conversation that I'd like to have with both of you, because he is on the record saying it's optimistic. And Chuck, you're gesticulating, so go. Well, the first thing I wanted to ask you, if Sean just told you to watch this, I don't know what he told you beforehand, but after watching the first episode, did you know what it was about? Because I have to say, I feel like it would be impossible to watch just the first episode, did you know what it was about?

Because I have to say, I feel like it would be impossible to watch just the first episode and be like, oh, this is about how individualism is problematic. I don't think that I just don't, you know, and that doesn't bother me at all. I'm just curious what you would have thought. I think I maybe got individualism versus collectivism. I'll be honest, I didn't watch them all in a row because I'm not a binge watcher. And so what's in episode one versus episode five versus episode six now is like a little blurry to me. But it does introduce a couple of the main characters. There is the kind of US suburbanism in the 50s versus the cultural revolution in China. That's the first episode, right? And so, you know, maybe thematically,

I didn't have a huge sense of the arc. But the other thing is that I was learning the style simultaneously, right? Because I had maybe seen clips or something, but to sit down and watch for, you know, an hour straight, you're picking up a lot of what I consider to be like his artistic habits and all of these clips and how these clips are coming together. And you have to move from like TikTok brain to, you know, message and idea brain, even though I do think like the two are a bit overlapping and Chuck when you were like I could just watch this for 12 hours it's called TikTok buddy um I find it really disorienting but there there is a lot of in a lot of ways to me it felt like I was inside the internet but finally someone had made sense of the internet um and that was both but I did not

think it did not remind me of TikTok in any think it did not remind me of tiktok in any way it did not remind me like you know uh um what i meant by so when i was comparing it to like mtv in the 80s is that when you watch these you know the various sections when he talks about a character or he talks about a concept it's not like it's by in a blink it's four minutes or five minutes and you're kind of, you know, you're learning about Mao's wife or you're learning about this transgender person in the seventies. You're like, you're learning all this information, but then when it moves on to the next one,

particularly if you watch a documentary, like a conventional one, the idea is that, well, these things are sequenced in a way that they all interlock and that there's a reason you went from a, to B, to C, to D. He doesn't do that so much.

He kind of forces you to say like, well, um, there's a relationship here, but it might be three hours before I see what it is. And I think, I don't know. I,

for me, that that's like, it doesn't, it didn't feel like these things are autonomous. They do feel like they're connected, but the connections aren't clear. And I, I, I'm not, I don't know, maybe what I'm, as I'm saying this out loud, and I'm thinking if someone's hearing this, they're like, well, so this sounds like confusing and hard to watch, but it't hard to watch like it's it's very easy to watch considering how as you say how dense it is and how like kind of just jam full of information that that some of these you know windows of time contain i think part of the reason for that is because of the filmmaking style which is very hypnotic frankly sometimes to the point of like a disassociation for me where at a certain point it takes on that like wallpaper ish it's like this is

my version of hgtv you know where it's like this is kind of what i want to have almost on in the background of my life as something that is sort of narrating my own cynicism about the way that systems work. Because that is basically the story that he's telling. He takes these, you know, between eight and 10 lives throughout history in the last, what, 80 or so years, 100 or so years. And he very explicitly draws distinct conclusions about biographical aspects of their lives and how they fit into the systems or influence societies. So he does it with all of this archival footage, and he has at his fingertips, because he's an employee of the BBC, the vast archive of BBC

news footage. So he's pulling from one of the most significant media libraries that has ever existed to make this huge compendium of footage. And he's now done it, whatever. He's made several films. This is probably the most ambitious thing he's ever done. And then what he does on top of it is he writes these incredibly dense and complex scripts that are pretty easy to parody to the point of the film Twitter bit that's happening right now. It's something that's been going on since hyper-normalization, I would say, where he kind of is the new Werner Herzog in this way, where like making fun of him is also a note of affection towards him. And he also is kind of parodied, I think,

for this sense that like it all kind of fits together. And there is this kind of ease with which his theories connect that explain things. And of course, life isn't necessarily that simple. But then the last thing, and this really jumps out to me as I watch this film is he has dynamite taste in music and in scoring and he has such a like a he frankly has like a 38 year old pitchfork reader's taste in music you know he has very into mine yes very into ambient music very into electronic music post very into electronic music, post-punk, a smattering of indie rock.

He loves like an aggressive needle drop to announce a new section. And he, so he's like a total filmmaker. You know, he is looking at all aspects of the form in a way that like documentary now, not documentary now,

the series, the documentaries today, there are millions of them and they're being consumed at a higher rate than ever. So if you just fire up Netflix, you're almost certainly going to be served a documentary. For the most part, that's great. The craft on most of those films is not very good. This is a person who takes years and years to make his movies, and he has this very distinct style.

And I think we should talk about the ideas in the movie, but one of the reasons why these movies continue to work on me, and I've watched almost all of his movies now, is he is clearly a master of his own craft. He knows exactly what he wants to do, and that's how he lures you in. Did you feel that as you were watching it, Chuck, or were you more engaged with the ideas? Well, no, because I think that the question I hear people sort of asking about this is that there seems to be a consensus that this is good but some people are like well is it a is it a constructive accomplishment or is it sort of an ideological accomplishment like is the main like and well and and i guess like many of his points i guess i disagree with you, but I think from a construct, so, so that might skew my perception of, of this, but to me, it's, it's like, it is the construction of

this is why it's incredible. I mean, and that's why I think that I would feel very comfortable recommending this to people who have no interest in politics or the 20th century. Like, I think that you could still enjoy this just because it doesn't – it is almost every sort of modifier you can use to describe something occasionally comes up in this. Sometimes it is dreamlike. Sometimes it is Kafkaesque. Sometimes it is, you know, persuasive. You know, sometimes it is dreamlike sometimes it is kafka-esque sometimes it is you know persuasive

you know sometimes it is contradictory uh and then there's there's but you know it's like there there's a bunch of stuff in it that that i wouldn't he talks about conspiracy theories for example and one of the things that he brings up when talking about conspiracy theories is that these are people who are seeing patterns where patterns don't exist. That does seem very much like the flaw because that's like a, that's, you know, that's also what an insane person does or whatever. But I like that though. I mean, I, I, I guess I, I find that to be a part of what, like it's entertaining, but it's also impressive to me and i i think that's part of

why i could watch it for 12 hours because it is similar to watching anything whether it's you know sports or a musician or something where it's like i this is i i i'm impressed that this person can do this like it it as somebody who writes a lot about culture and writes about the past and tries to connect things, it makes me feel bad sometimes because I'm like, I just, I can't do it like this. Like, this is, this is such a jump beyond my ability to make these kinds of connections that, um, I, I, I like it the way I like watching, you know, when I was a kid, watching my older brother do something

that I just could not do or whatever. And I was just, it is like, the fact that I feel bad about myself is kind of like a compliment to him, you know? Amanda, did Adam Curtis make you feel bad about yourself? Well, yes, but not because I can't do what he can do. And I want to go back to that, Chuck, because I agree with you. He made me feel bad about yourself? Well, yes, but not because I can't do what he can do. And I want to go back to that talk because I agree with you. He made me feel bad about myself because like now I am more aware that I'm trapped in a system that isn't really real and that no one

has been able to change over time. And I'm not sure I agree with the last 15 or even like 10 minutes of part six where it is suggested that there is another possibility. And I don't know how much heart there is in that and whether I'm actually supposed to take that on face value, but Chuck, I agree with you just in this sense of I was, I was thinking a lot about like op-eds and, you know, an opinion. And one of the things that is a feature of our modern society, which again, this documentary shows is that we're just like confronted with everybody's opinions all the time.

It's just everyone talking to each other. And, you know, some of those opinions are good and some of them are hate speech and like, it's just all together all the time and it can kind of blur. And I was just taken aback by how Adam Curtis managed to create a new way of expressing his ideas that are distinct and aren't like an artistic is what I think. And here is how it connects. And here, you know, I guess he is looking for patterns across history, but he is really actually drawing things together for, for meaning. And I think there's a distinction. Well, I mean, like your reference to like your brain, that's, it's kind of a good segue for this because like there's one part in this part in this documentary where he's, I can't remember what the individual's name is, but he's talking about the scientist who came to the realization that essentially the eyes are the best way to understand the you measure um people's eyes you can or do all these sort of you know these different ways basically to look at

at your pupils and whatnot he was able to understand like how people react to information give them information and then the way their eyes react is telling you how they actually think about something and that's interesting, you know, to a point. But then he goes to the kind of further point, which is then the realization that maybe, well, it's not just necessarily measuring what people think. What if it's measuring things that we have no control over? And that's why when you said earlier, you'd be interested if it was optimistic or pessimistic. That's kind of the core question here. Like what he is at times arguing is that the decisions people make, what they think, how

they feel, they have no agency over. So are you comfortable with the idea that we don't really have a control over how we think and feel? Or does that bother you? And I guess that sort of dictates if you see this as positive or negative i think it's a question of how much you actually believe in the idea of collectivism you know because there is not really any evidence in the movie and in the storytelling that signals that it is possible in fact it's the opposite it It's 100 years of evidence of this kind of retreat into the self, especially post baby boomer culture, indicates that people are self-involved and that we have all of these tools at our fingertips that

are also distractions that allow us to focus on ourself. You know, he is kind of rejecting the decades long self-improvement ideology or whatever it represents now in social media. And you can see it over and over again. And look at the characters that he picks. Arthur Sackler is the founder of Purdue Pharma, who develops Valium and then Oxycontin. And those are narcotizing drugs that kind of shut people's senses down and deny them the ability to kind of expand beyond themselves and think about the world more holistically. Or Dominic Cummings, who was a signature figure in the Leave campaign and Brexit. And he's zeroing in on these people in very discreet ways to show how basically societies are taken advantage of. And that is the primary focus of this eight hour film.

It's not here. All the ways in which humans can unite together to defeat these systems that are built by corporations and the powerful. But it might be, though, because isn't I'm not going to get this perfect, but isn't the epigram to this? It's like some guy saying we forget that humans created the world which means we could create it in a different way you know like he's that's like this and when you he i think that's in the first episode where he shows this quote where he's like yes yes and and when you and much of what is in this documentary sort of contradicts that although it can't contradict it entirely because it's an impossible idea to totally contradict

obviously if everybody thought differently about everything the world would be different but what i often took from this was that because reality is just a collection of systems that the ability to break out of that systematic thinking is impossible. And it's also another contradiction because he's kind of against individualism. So in theory, you shouldn't want to break out of the collective thinking. You should join everybody else and go like, what are we thinking about this? Let's keep thinking about this. But if that is the case, well, then the way things are going to continue, which is maybe his criticism. I don't know.

I don't think it's important whether or not he succeeds in this idea. I really don't. I think that this is like – I don't know what another example of this would be. It would be like a book that is so well written, it does not matter that the ending makes no sense yes so like you know or fitting in his wake or something i guess might be like something like that where it's like where the accomplishment is the fact that it was made and that if the problem somebody has with it is like well i don't i don't really know what he meant by that it's like well i get i mean there's a lot of things we don't really know what it means and you can still like it, you know? And I mean, it's fun to talk about these

ideas, but I really do think they're secondary to the success of this. Well, it's funny that you put it in those terms though, because when he was asked what the goal for this film was, he said literally to make something more emotionally involving more like a novel. Amanda, you're frankly a much bigger reader than I am. Did you feel like it had that kind of novelistic, even Finnegan's Wake quality, or were you mostly just searching for what's the point? Well, I'm a literal person, so I'm always searching for the point. And also it is, I mean, that's one of the central questions that he's asking again is like, what is the point and what animates people and why are we doing all of this?

And maybe the point is to make you experience the anxiety and the questions and the not knowing for eight hours. Like maybe that's the emotions. But to the novel thing, you know, he does introduce characters that you follow over time. I thought it actually, it puts a personal face on some of these ideas that to me, as someone who starts to tune out, once we get too deep into like philosophy 101, I appreciated having the characters to follow. So yes, but Chuck is correct that every single

one of the characters like fails at changing the world. Yeah. Well, okay. So like I saw that interview cause I went i went where like he compares it to a novel or whatever but to me this is like this is proof of the limitations of journalism you've made an eight-hour documentary and then somebody's like well okay explain what it is in 80 seconds well if he could do that he would not need to make an eight-hour documentary it's like it's an idiot so like anytime this is just this i bet i mean i can't speak for every creative person who's done any endeavor but so very often you do something and then somebody asks you a question because you're promoting it like he was promoting this

and there's always true two answers there's the answer you give to a journalist when asked the question and then the real answer which is usually something like i don't know that's how it seems two answers. There's the answer you give to a journalist when asked the question, and then the real answer, which is usually something like, I don't know, it's how it seemed to be. Like, you know, it's like, like, it's like, I did it because it seemed like the natural thing. I think to ask him to explain this, like, if someone's like, you got to really tell me what you're trying to do with this, to make it. This is a big project. So I don't. So, I mean, you use words like novelistic because people hear that and they kind of understand what it means. But I mean, it's not really like reading a novel.

I mean, I would say watching The Wire or watching Mad Men is actually more like reading a novel. I mean, is it like reading a nonfiction book? Is it like reading Sapiens or something? Or is it like reading a book about, you know, the devil in the white city or something? Well, sort of, but not really, because, you know, it's the characters he uses never overlap or often don't even live at the same time period or whatever, you know?

So is it like an essay collection about popular history it's a little like cloud atlas in that like all the characters are different but they're basically the same you know like that idea that we're kind of like replicating experience over time and if you look at you know michael x who's one of the significant figures here and jang shing who is Mao's wife, who you mentioned. They're totally different, but in many ways, they've had very similar experiences. They were within touching distance of a kind of radical change in the way that a society functions, but also they seem to betray their own instincts at times. And so he's drawing these conclusions between these characters in the same way that I think a book

like Cloud Atlas is trying to do with different characters over you know hundreds or thousands of years even so what i would say is the connection is him okay yes there are probably aspects within all of these characters that uh that can be unified into like you know this series but really he is the connection adam curtis is the connection he sees these people and he's looking for what matters to him. He's looking for what's interesting to him. And he sees it in all of these people. I feel like there are probably, I don't know, 500 other people he considered using in this.

And he probably, you know, he looked at Terry Bradshaw or something. And he said, Terry Bradshaw as sort of like dealing with the idea of like should i be part of this collective or must like you can see the it's i mean this is the best case example of somebody where they go like oh if your mind is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail okay for him it's kind of like that. For him, everything in the world kind of looks like this friction between being an individual and sort of joining together to upend power, which in his mind is always oppressive, almost in any context. Like, I don't know if it would be interesting to ask him, like, if he views any sort of institutions as in any way positive for society or fair you know um you know and it's also interesting because like the problem with the oppression of institutions is it

hurts the individual but he's against the individual like it's like there's all these things that that i feel like as i watch it and i think about it, I'm arguing with myself about whether or not, uh, it, uh, I disagree with him or if actually he's forcing me to ask something about myself that I don't want to ask. And it's like, maybe like,

like he's demanding that I, you know, re-examine my views, which I think probably happened a few times while I watched this. Um, but I don't know. I, I just, I, I just think that people would enjoy it. Like, I think that for a free thing on YouTube, it's fucking amazing to me that you can just go on the computer and there it is.

And like, you don't have to do anything. It's, you know, there's no ads during it. I, there wasn't for for me at least the very last episode i watched there was an ad for something um there like i you know was it for oxycontin i don't know i had to hit the skip ad button or like you know when the last when the whole countdown happened but um it's just you know there there are so many things it's just, you know, there, there are so many things. It's like, you're trying to figure out like, is it worth it? Is it worth the small amount of money I'm paying for? Is it worth the time investment? Um, you know, I, I, I just, it almost, I was, I'm almost, I just blown away that this thing

is just a free thing that everyone can watch and think about. Let me ask you guys just one last thing about this before we go to the next topic. So I think a lot of people were expecting, especially those who saw hyper normalization and saw the story that he was trying to tell about Donald Trump as part of that film, that this would be Adam Curtis's response and reflection on the Trump administration, Brexit, the rise of a certain kind of autocratic populist leader around the world. And it sort of is. And it sort of isn't at all. And it seems to be trying to tell a much more, a century-long version of that story, as opposed to focusing specifically the way that a lot of these books that are going to come out about Trump will in a year or so. So what did you make of the

decision to essentially like hardly reflect on Trump at all in this, even though there is something obviously a little bit more cosmologically related to what is happening with what's been happening with power in the world lately well uh i mean personally i'm glad that he made the decision he made like i i feel like that would have been a little bit distracting because like even in hyper normalization you know like it basically starts in syria in 1976 okay and it moves up and then the end of hyper-normalization is about Trump and about Brexit. That was 2016 though, so it's like these things which had just kind of happened.

I feel as though if there had been too much emphasis on the last 10 years in this, it would have thrown the thing out of balance. Because what his ideas are really that this is almost like a cultural creep, that these

things have changed over a long period of time. And to say that this is, you know, like to somehow suggest that the last five years are like when this really happens, I don't think that's true. And I also don't think he believes that. So do you think it would have been, would you have liked it if there had been more Trump in it? Amanda, what do you think? Absolutely not. And I think, you know, I agree with Chuck. It's a project about how did we get here?

And then it is also simultaneously trying to redefine what here is and look at like the different aspects of the world. But I mean, you can also sense his own exasperation in the Trump and the media stuff that he does include. There is that supercut in, I believe, the last episode where it's just like the walls are closing in and it's very clear what he thinks about MSNBC moms, like, and the, and the Russia investigation over the last four years. And, you know, I think I, and you guys, and probably anyone who makes it to part six of this documentary has enough context to understand that including that snippet includes,

is a comment on everything that got to people on MSNBC, just repeating talking points about Russia and Trump the whole time. Like you have all of that information and I personally lived through it and don't need to see it again. But that also feels like a very 2021 answer, right? And so is this documentary for this moment is it for history do people have that context 20 years from now but also like do you really need it i like i think people can fill in the blanks well it is you know it's like okay i watched a documentary last night about this uh this artist who had died of aids and at one point the there was footage of ronald reagan talking and it's ronald reagan saying you know we're going to make America great again, which I've now seen probably in 10 different newsreels or documentaries

because people are like, aha, you see, we can kind of push it back to the right now. We can show that this had like this origin way back when. But all it does is sort of remove you from the idea itself by saying this is actually about modernity it's not really about a concept um so i i don't think like i i mean i also i don't know like when with this series when it was finished do you i mean like when was he working in on it up until i i don't know you know i think he was working on it all the way up until the end of last year but you think the one thing that the film does that is quote-unquote modern is it features an extended speech at some sort of conference by Steve Bannon who is very clearly

outlining how he utilized the 100 years that has just been detailed in the film to essentially execute a plan to seize power. And if you want to say that the film is optimistic, you could make the case that with that administration now done, there is a pathway towards meaningfully changing things. I think that's too optimistic for me personally. I don't quite buy into that, but I thought it was persuasive to basically wait until the final 30 minutes to show you, here's what I'm talking about. We've been on this slow train to hell and now we're here and your life is officially run by five corporations and two political parties and you have no control unless you do something about it, which is powerful. And I thought unique to the kind of storytelling that we're talking about here, because those kind of 1.0 documentaries that you're describing,

Chuck, the idea of like, well, Ronald Reagan said this 35 years ago. And so the arc of time is short is oversimplified. And we know it's oversimplified. But I think for most viewers, to your point, Amanda, people do need their handheld. And so the idea of someone like Adam Curtis becoming, even if it's in a very small way, a phenomenon is extraordinarily unlikely. I mean, there are very few things in our culture that are like this, that are this dense, that are this sophisticated. And even if it is a bit galaxy brain at times, that it is like reaching hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and they're engaging with it, and they're finishing it and watching it, it's fascinating to me. And it's literally the reason why I wanted to talk about it,

because the idea of something like this going mass at all is very rare. But then it also raises the question of when it goes mass, will people receive it with the rigor and the context that... No, it's just more opiate for the masses, unfortunately. Right, exactly. It turns into the... It eats itself. Well, the other thing that was interesting is it's just more opiate for the masses right exactly it turns into the you know it eats itself well the other thing that was interesting is it's it's you know because it's made by a british guy you know but he talks a lot about america it is it's a it is a very sort of kind of unique insight to the way american culture is perceived in other places.

And it kind of is like things that we kind of think are amplified over there, like his view of the suburbs, you know, and just like the idea of the suburban experience, that's a very common thing in like U.S. art, the idea that's like, there's just, you know, it's a dystopia. It's to live in the suburbs. It's like your life is just a, it's just, you know it's the dystopia it's to live in the suburbs it's like your life is just a it's just you know and that sort of american depiction seems to be what he thinks is how it actually is like like like the the exact the american exaggeration becomes like the normal way of seeing it i mean um i remember once seeing when i was in living germany briefly

and i i there was an art exhibit in east germany about cowboys and it was so strange to see how like german people perceive the way they think america's americans perceive the cowboy ideography like it's it's cause you know, it's like Americans love cowboys or whatever, but there's also kind of a distance between what we think they were and all this. And they're like, they don't,

they assume Americans don't have that, that they can't tell us that, you know, like, like the fake version is the version. Like, did you think like, were there things in this that you guys watched while you were watching it? You thought to yourself, he's just getting this wrong. Well, the one, like, did you think like, were there things in this that you guys watched while you were watching it?

You thought to yourself, he's just getting this wrong. Well, the one, the, the, the key entry point for someone like me is that, you know, I think it's in part two, there's a lot of time spent on a Phoenicia core and a Phoenicia cores experience with the black Panther party. And then that circles back around again in the final two parts to the experience of Tupac Shakur and in the United States and in American culture. And he experience of Tupac Shakur in the United States and in American culture. And he posits Tupac in this really interesting way, which is to say he identifies him as his mother's son and as a true revolutionary who is essentially consumed by the

art and the culture that he is participating in and perverted by it and made to become a kind of victim of its own aggrandizement, selfishness, violence, however you want to describe it. I think that's a pretty credulous reading of Tupac. I don't know if that's exactly what happened to Tupac. And there are people who knew Tupac who might quibble with that specific definition. But it certainly feels like a 50 something year old British guy looking at Tupac videos and making an assumption about them, as opposed to necessarily interviewing, say, someone who was his producer

in 1993. But that's the risk you take when you make a film like this. Because he uses a lot of that. There's footage of this interview that Tupac Shakur gave as a 17-year-old when he was in high school. And it's amazing. It's like it's just, I've seen it before, but it's like every time you watch that and then you kind of compare it to the

kind of character he turned himself into, it's this bizarre thing. It's like, how could, how could this person be this person? You know, it's like, how could somebody who sort of understands, but the falseness of this world then actually become part of it and all that i mean his perception of tupac is very positive i felt though right i mean like it is but almost almost saint almost saint like i think you know it is but that seemed odd to me but it does create like this kind of victimhood status for him you know that he basically like exposed himself and thrust himself into a world that,

and it's like, it speaks to maybe the ultimate issue with all Adam Curtis work and frankly, all like philosophical documentary filmmaking, which is it really struggles with duality. It really struggles with the idea that collectivism and individualism actually have an opportunity to live together in a strange way. It does not have to be all or nothing, but that's not necessarily what he's suggesting here. Are we over-talking it, Amanda? What do you think? No, I was going to answer, I think that the Tupac elements

definitely stood out. But to answer your question, Chuck, the way that Clinton and the 90s are portrayed from the British perspective was fascinating to me, not because it was wrong, but because of the way the script was written. Um, and it would just describe motivations or, you know, political or business developments to Clinton as fact. Um, and you know, that's what all journalism or history or anything

does is that you, you take the evidence in front of you and the facts that you have and you make your own interpretation. But those were situations where I was like, yeah, I think that's true. But also maybe there was this element of it that you're skipping. And again, that's art, that's journalism, that's exactly how stories get told. But there's something about the tone of specifically the voiceover and then the authority with which all the images are put together that this is you can kind of forget that it's just one person's interpretation. Like the connection, as you said earlier, Chuck, is Adam Curtis. And this is his view of the world. And I think he makes a very compelling case for his own view of things. But it is it is,

it is just a theory. It's just an interpretation. It's the, it isn't history, no matter how authoritative and like solemn his reading is. And, and that, that tension to me is an interesting part of the project.

Well, I know it's, I love the fact that like, he is like supportive of people who have like, are kind of historical monsters in some cases, like thousands of deaths. And it's like, but he's like,

Hey, this is, this is, yeah, that's true too. But like my interest in this person is sort of what they represent, not what they did, you know?

And I don't know if someone in America could do that. It doesn't seem like that happens much in America anymore. Well, I would encourage everybody out there to check this film out. And let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about a different theory, which is a theory that Chuck has about movies. Okay, Chuck, we're back. So six or nine months ago, we were texting and I said, if you could talk about anything on the big picture,

any idea you have about movies, what would you want to talk about? And you shared an idea with me. And it's a bold idea. It's a brave idea. What is the idea? Well, first of all, I can't even say it's a bold idea. It's a brave idea. What is the idea? Well, first of all, I can't even say it's completely my idea. I'm not the first person who ever thought of this. I think Roger Ebert may have written about this like 30-some years ago. But I'm not sure if that's the first place I saw it or if I came up with it on my own

and I just then read about it. And I was like, I've thought this too. You never know. It's always a good question. It's like, if you put a kid in a desert island when he's two years old and he grows up and he builds a windmill, is he a genius? Because he didn't invent the windmill,

but no one told him to do it. You know, it's like, if you come up with an idea and then you realize somebody else had the ideas, it's still like you thought of it. I don't know. But one thing that I've just always been fascinated by is do movies exist within movies? That if you're watching a movie and, you know, it is, you know, you can pick almost any fictional film. Like I think the one we were, we were, we were email or texting about it was like, okay,

so in the Rocky series, do the Rambo movies exist? And does the movie over the top exist? One of the things that I think in the Roger Ebert piece, he mentioned is like in desperately seeking Susan, Madonna goes to a club and she dances to a madonna song so what does she hear and you know it's this idea that in the reality of a movie um do movies involving those people you know exist now i realized somebody would be like well

this is kind of idiotic this seems like like something that just, you know, pot smoking people talk about or whatever. It's like, you know, but I actually think it's a little more meaningful than that. Okay. Because I feel like the degree to which people engage with this question reflects a lot on how they think about movies and appreciate movies in general okay because okay let's say we were watching a a new romantic comedy came out okay it's set in the present tense it's happening right now it's in new york it's um ryan reynolds and fucking i don't know emma stoner in this movie And in this romantic comedy, they've been in a movie before, actually.

No, I don't think so. But anyways, so let's say they're in this rom-com and, oh, they're unhappy people and they meet and it's great and then there's a misunderstanding so they're no longer together and then at the end of the movie, something happens to bring them back together and everything is great. It's funny.

It's charming. You know, they have good chemistry. And in the last scene of the movie, something happens to bring them back together and everything is great. It's funny. It's charming. They have good chemistry. And in the last scene of the movie, they're walking around New York and then you clearly see the Twin Towers are there. Does that change the way you think about this movie? Meaning, is this a film that's made in 2021? Yeah, it's set in 2021. All of these things happen. And at the end of the movie the twin towers are still there i mean well yes it definitely changes my experience i'll just be very honest it becomes a science fiction movie essentially right it suddenly tells you that whatever you

saw in this movie is happening in a different kind of reality where the twin tower where all of these you know that that in fact everything you saw on the movie now you have to go back and reinvestigate because it's like okay well the world is different now obviously all these things you know that everything in the movie must be attached to the fact that we're in a different world entirely but many movies in fact almost all movies are dealing with a small version of this all the time. Now, say you're watching, you know, the beach, okay? Okay, in the reality of the beach, did Titanic happen? Okay, because, you know, if it did,

that means either someone else is Leonardo DiCaprio in this reality, that the person we're seeing in the beach, the main character is not Leonardo DiCaprio in this reality, that the person we're seeing in the beach, the main character is not Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie, or it meant, oh, Matthew McConaughey was in Titanic. And if Matthew McConaughey was in Titanic, then he probably wasn't in the Newton boys in contact. And if he wasn't in the Newton boys, maybe that falls through. Okay. That movie doesn't happen at all. So now Ethan Hawke gets the role in contact and now all these people who were going to see contact because they like dazed and confused are not going to see this movie people who maybe would eventually go to this movie on a first date end up getting married like everything about the world is different in the reality of the beach if titanic exists or

doesn't exist so whenever we talk about this idea, this idea of do movies exist in other movies, there's three possible responses to have. One is, I just don't think about it. It doesn't matter, which is how most people are. One is, I do think about this and I can find a way to explain it, or it's absolutely unexplainable. So what do you guys think when you watch a movie? Do you think other movies exist within those worlds? Amanda, would you like to take this first? Well, I would just, may I ask some questions?

Is that allowed? Yes. Like, just so, you know, because I am, I'm hearing this for the first time beyond beyond our outline, which thank you for filling that out, Chuck. But so I want to go back to the beach in Titanic just so I can wrap my head around this. So we're assuming that Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor, is bringing all of his experiences as an actor to the reality of the beach, the movie. Is that wrong? I think that's wrong. Okay.

Then, then what, where am I? Okay. Here's what, here's what I'm saying. Okay. Wait,

maybe this is a way to, to, to boil it down even simple. Okay. When you watch a movie, are you watching the movie and thinking about the movie as if everything you're seeing is real? And that what you're seeing in the reality of that film is actual, okay? Or are you separate from it and you're having like a higher degree of aesthetic distance and you're like, it's just a movie.

I don't need these things to be explained. Because if you're somebody who's like, well, this idea, this problem is totally irrelevant. It's sort of negates the possibility of criticizing a movie for being unrealistic. You know what I'm saying? If you're, if we're, if, if, yeah, you know, so, so using the beach as an example, the character that Leonardo DiCaprio is playing in the beach. Okay. In the beginning of that movie, he's going over to like, I don't know,

Asia or the Philippines or whatever. He's about to go to this secret beach. Could he watch Titanic on the plane? Oh, I see. Over to Asia. Yeah, of course he could.

Who's in the movie? Well, I hadn't thought that far, but why couldn't he be in it? But then he would be seeing himself. I see what you're saying. And that raises some existential issues. Okay. So there are some important mile markers in this conversation because I feel like in the 1990s,

this is an idea that took hold amongst a certain kind of literate video store clerk and a certain kind of that ultimately became a screenplay writer type. Shane Black, that kind of a thinker about movies, the same kind of writer who would write notes in the stage direction that was specifically directed at movie executives, for example. That know, that famous line about how Shane Black would write, you know, describe someone's house and describe it as the kind of house he was going to buy when

this screenplay sells for a million dollars in the notes. And so in the 90s, you get a lot of movies that are very movie conscious. So I'm thinking specifically of Last Action Hero, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a character.

He sees... Yes. Go ahead. Well, he sees like a... He sees himself... He sees a movie poster for... Is it like a Terminator movie or something?

Is that what it was? Yes. Well, he actually literally... The character from the movie steps out of the movie into, quote-unquote, the real world, what we perceive to be the real world of the movie. And then the character from that movie of the movie into quote unquote the real world, what we perceive to be

the real world of the movie. And then the character from that movie within the movie sees the real Arnold Schwarzenegger at a movie premiere. And then we are fully through the looking glass. Now, this is a movie

that at the time was considered a failure and overwrought and stupid. And for me, being 12 years old, I was like, this is the smartest movie that's ever been made and maybe the most important movie that's ever been made. Because it's tangling specifically with the question that you're asking. But it goes even a step further by having a third

layer of movie inside of it. Although in this case, like, when I'm using the word reality in terms of these movies, it's like we're accepting the reality that the movie presents. Okay. So the last action hero, there are multiple levels of, of sort of what is real, what isn't, can you, can a fictional character be nonfiction in a, in Fight Club, for example, there's a scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt and the woman who plays Marla are, are like walking on the street and you see a movie marquee for seven years in Tibet. Okay. So who is in that movie? Okay. Well,

that's a good question in the context of Fight Club, because Fight Club is dealing with the idea of multiple things. The idea that one person is two people, all of these things, Last Action Hero, the same way. To me, the question becomes much more interesting in a film that is saying this reality is fixed. Okay. That, that, that the rules that we use in life, we are supposed to use now. Okay.

That we don't expect there to be, you know, multiple, you know, the multiverse is not like emerging from the screen or whatever. That is where I think it gets to be kind of like a like a really kind of intriguing question because okay well can i can i raise one other possibility here that i think will speak this will speak to amanda's interests as well the movie that most aggressively

confronts this concept is oceans 12 because it insinuates that there is a world in which there is a woman named Tess who looks exactly like Julia Roberts, so much so that she could be used as a stand-in for the real Julia Roberts who is in the world. Sean, this is really funny because I was thinking of a different Julia Roberts movie, which is in fact Notting Hill. And Julia Roberts is playing a Julia Roberts character who is a rom-com star. Well, she's a movie star. She does all sorts of things, including films on submarines. But does Julia Roberts, the movie actress, exist in the world of Notting Hill where Julia Roberts isna scott who is supposed to be julia roberts that i don't know the answer to well okay but you guys are now talking about or at least sean

as it seems like talking about movies that sort of textually address this issue like in oceans 11 or maybe ocean 11 12 whatever one it was it's like we are told this person looks like Julia Roberts. And because of that, that sort of becomes the reality we accept. I mean, like if you watch a Star Trek movie, we accept that it can move at eight times the speed of light or whatever. We don't go like, well, that couldn't be. It's like they say that. That's the rules they set. Okay. It's like they say that, that's the rules they set. I'm always more interested in movies where, or this problem as it applies to movies, who do not expand the parameters of what we're, you know, like a movie where, like in this example I used, this fictional movie like with the Twin Towers, where it doesn't affect the plot.

You could easily say say i don't care it had nothing to do with anything i saw okay i think that's how a lot of people would would view this problem in reverse that they'd be like well that's you know you take intro to theater arts or whatever they talk about suspension of disbelief like you just you you understand that like you know somehow this all works out but i find that if you start thinking about this it it really uh can become a very consuming thing that it can become almost become the only thing you start thinking about while you're watching a film and i do think it says something about the way a person thinks about movies in general. Because like I say, if you're somebody who's like, well,

this is a distraction from what the film is. It doesn't matter. It's kind of stupid. We all know that if we're watching Rocky, that like we're not supposed to be worried about the movie Cobra. You know, it's like, we're not supposed to think of that. Like we're supposed to think of what we're seeing. But when I watch a film,

I like to pretend what I'm seeing is real. Okay. In totality that what I'm seeing is real based on the rules they put in, you know? So since we're going to this place, this is going to give me an opportunity to make a case for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here's why. Amanda is already rolling her eyes and nodding her head, but this is a direct reflection of what you're describing, which is you're presuming that every time a

screenwriter sits down to write a screenplay and then people come together to make a movie, they are making a movie that is inside of an entire universe that the story may be just talking about two characters. It could just be about Ryan Reynolds and Emma Stone and their love affair, but there's a whole world surrounding them. Everything that goes on in the world is potentially happening here in this movie. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the first time in the history of movies that a story, a series of stories, has attempted to reflect the world in full over a long period of time. And so every single thing that every character does could potentially impact another character and another story. Now, whether or not you think that's a good thing, whether it's aesthetically pleasing,

whether the performances are good, whether the effects are good, that's all subjective. But this is the first time in the history of movies that and they use the blip in those final movies as a way to kind of set the story forward because that was an event that happened the blip what's what's the blip that was when when half of the population of the world was eradicated half of the population of the universe was eradicated in this is like a mr ultra or something does it uh ultron or something it wasn't ultron thanos no it's true because no because here's the like okay i this is gonna contradict my little snarky statement okay so i'm looking forward to this king kong versus godzilla movie coming sure yeah okay so in that world in this world where we're going to have King Kong fight Godzilla, do the old Godzilla movies exist?

And are they historical fiction? Hmm. Like were the movies where Godzilla attacks Tokyo, is that someone, is that like Titanic? That someone's like, we're making now a disaster movie about this thing that happened in the past. Or are we to assume in the Godzilla King Kong world, there's never been a movie about any of these people, things, creatures, animals, beasts that's never existed? I say no, because that is a remake of a movie. The story arcs have been altered and the time has been altered, but it's a remake. I think an interesting version of this conversation is James Bond. In James Bond, is there any connectivity to previous James Bonds at all?

Because they're not. He doesn't seem to have memory. He doesn't seem to have memory of things he's done. You'd think that sometimes he would be say like, oh, well, this is not unlike what happened in, you know, it almost, it all, well, I mean, this, I, I, I, I'm not, I'm not sitting here saying like, this is like, this is some important thing. I just think it's, it's super fun to think about. Like, here's another example. Like you guys want, I'm sure Sean did manage you watch Friday night lights. Of course the TV show. Okay.

So when Friday night lights came out on DVD, there was like deleted scenes. Did those scenes happen to the characters? Right. Well, is that like a little bit about like what's canon in a story and what's not? I'm sure it's part of it. Yeah. You know, but like i i mean i it's it's you know like when you read a book and the book ends do the characters keep on doing stuff or does it end with the book is it only like if if if if you know star in star wars or whatever it's like do we have like what is luke skywalker doing on tattooing on a normal night do we even are we

even supposed to think about that or are we supposed to just say like yeah well but like i just you know what i'm saying it's like like i i as someone who looks at a movie and thinks to themselves like i'm going to allow myself to believe everything I'm seeing here is happening by the rules the director and screenwriter set. I am sort of fascinated by the idea of how that intersects with all the other culture that can't possibly exist if this movie does. Well, what about the inverse what about the pot because there are other there are plenty of examples of movies where other movies are directly commented upon you know a couple will be having dinner and then they'll talk about one of their old favorite movies and then that'll be sure but what about the inverse what about the movies where there's there are no other

movies that we've ever heard of or maybe there are no movies at all like isn't it possible because most movies don't address the existence of movies so is it possible that that is meant like the more normal thing is the closed environment in which our history and experience of hollywood doesn't even exist like is that basically it's your point a totally different multiverse okay so okay i'm saving so like in a movie like okay trying to give a movie where there's no other movies footloose there's dancing but no movies right okay saving. So like in a movie like, okay, trying to think of a movie where there's no other movies. Footloose. There's dancing, but no movies, right?

Okay. So are you like, in the movie Footloose, are you saying there's no other movies? That movies don't exist in that world? Furthermore, what if there's no other music than the music that appears in Footloose because the music is so vital to the lives of the people in Footloose?

Isn't that also possible? Except that he comes in from, he's been in Chicago and he has a quiet riot tape in his car. And he went to a dance in Chicago. He says he danced, I think it was Chicago. So he has all these memories of other cities where music exists.

I work from the assumption that movies exist in movies. I just want to know what they are. Going back to this example about the beach, it's like if he watched Titanic on the plane, who was in that movie? What was he seeing? I used to play a lot of video games, and I would play the college football game. The college football game would play in these stands of 80,000 people, all fictional. Sometimes I would think it's like, okay, in this world, are those 80,000 people then all going home after this game?

And like having little simulated lives? Like, you know, people talk about simulation theory. I guess this is part of the reason i'm so into it because that seems like these things seems connected you know well i was going to ask if we could go back to the emma stone ryan reynolds rom-com for a second um and it's maybe it's not the twin towers at the end of the romantic comedy but maybe it's a poster for another romantic comedy starring either Emma Stone or Ryan Reynolds, because this happens a lot, right? Like the rom-com is supposed

to be a really closed experience. They meet, they don't really like each other. Then they like each other. And then, you know, it ends and you don't want to know what happens next, but also the same actors and actresses, especially in the 90s and the 2000s, just did rom-com after rom-com. And rom-coms as a genre are really self-referential. They know that the other rom-coms exist, and there's kind of like a meta-narrative of being like, now I have to give the speech at the end, especially as time has gone on and we've tried to reinvent this genre.

Like people understand that the movies exist and the trope exists and the characters within the romantic comedies know that they have to act according to the rules of the genre. So I don't know how to solve it, but the characters can't know that the characters can't know those things but what about because they can't because they don't know because if we watch the movie and we're sort of trying to think of it as if well this is happening in reality they don't know their characters in within the ramcom emma stone and ryan and Ryan Reynolds are real people who have real lives.

They have different names and different histories, so they don't see themselves as characters. So if they're playing out tropes from other movies, that would seem to suggest these are movies they watched. Yes. You know, well, so then the movies are there. But there there there is a literal version of of this too, which is Scream. In Scream, the story essentially turns on the idea that we know the rules of horror movies because we've been watching horror movies all our lives, just like the characters in the movie who survive because they know movies.

But then conversely, there are other examples. Chuck, I don't know if you saw I'm Thinking of Ending Things, the Charlie Kaufman movie from last year. I did. But there is a parody of a movie in that movie that is a quote unquote Robert Zemeckis movie. Yes. And is that a movie that really exists in that world? Or is that just an opportunity for Charlie Kaufman to make kind of a mean spirited joke? I don't know.

In a Charlie Kaufman system though, if we're talking, you know, in a, in something he has made, okay. We sort of kind of work from the premise that what, that the rules are,

whatever he says they are. Okay. Like, I mean, or like in a movie, like being John Malkovich or whatever, it's like you could you can go into someone's brain and that's not something you can question you can't

say you didn't like being john malkovich because it was unrealistic somebody went into someone else's brain like you can't that doesn't really make sense to say that it's like like it's like you can't you can say like you didn't like the movie for lots of reasons but it can't be like well it didn't seem possible or whatever um you keep bringing up these examples of movies that have a degree of self-awareness yes and that's different than what i'm talking about because self-awareness suggests that okay you as the viewer are supposed to understand that these people like you or you talking about rom-coms or whatever where they reference these things it's a degree of self-awareness where it's sort of like we're all kind of in this together okay the things that the characters are thinking and the things that you're thinking are not that

separate okay this is just a movie okay we know it and in a weird way they know it okay i'm more into the idea of a lack of self-awareness consciously by the people in the movie the people in the movie are not behaving like movie characters they are behaving like people and in that world how do we explain this strange sort of of of unavoidable problem where the people in that movie are also in other movies that they could feasibly see i don't think that amanda or i can have a definitive point of view other than to say that this is why you're one of the best people to go to a bar with and talk to because you are willing to explore a concept like this to its native endpoint but you said you

mentioned when we were talking about this that this leads to some sort of conversation about biopics and biopics was the only other kind of thing that you wanted to talk about when i first texted you so what is the correlation between the potentiality of this and biopic movies okay so like i was just on that rewatch with this podcast about the doors okay with uh with bill and chris and i like like I'm very interested in biopics in general. I know it's sort of like, in some ways, like the bottom of the pyramid in terms of what moviemaking is considered. It's like people make fun of them all the time.

The language is really weird. But it is an interesting deal because in a biopic now, that's supposed to be like the story of something that happened that happened okay of a real person in their life but we also work from the idea that it is interpretive that if if you know oliver stone makes you know a movie about george bush or movie about nixon or whatever and he inserts sort of what he thinks their pathos is or what he thinks, what drives it. And we're supposed to watch it.

And I guess think it's like, like, are we supposed to think that this is a true understanding of the individual that maybe they didn't even understand about themselves? This other person does, or are we supposed to watch it as like, this is a different possibility. This is one way it could have been.

I mean, when you guys watch biopics, how much do you care about the director or the screenwriters willingness to make the person behave in a way that they did not in life? Well, I guess it depends a little bit on how much I know about the person themselves, because, you know, I bring a different level of knowledge. You know a lot. Let's say you know a lot. Okay, I know a lot.

Someone you know a lot about. Okay. So I guess, I mean, we all know that I'm like making a list of every single thing that it's like, this isn't how I thought it was, or this is, I guess I'm doing that mental checklist, but I think because I just like to be a know-it-all, but in terms of the experience for me, Chuck, I actually also like biopics. I'm the only person left, but I think it's because I think you can use a historical figure in order to tell a story about something other than the person. And I think that's when the biopic succeeds the most, when it's about more than just this person was born here and did this and their father did this and then this happened and then they died. So you support the idea of the person sort of changing what the person's life was for some secondary, theoretically more important purpose.

I mean, I'm going to regret saying this and within reason, but yes. But, but I mean, you can't just make them a complete, I guess you can just have, make them have like the opposite experience of their life because then that would be like an artistic choice that would say something. But I, you know, the person, your audience would need to know the person's original story in order for that to work I I am okay with some artistic license because I the viewer understand that it is fictional though Chuck do you watch the crown at all you know know, I didn't. I did not watch The Crown. I'm not very interested in the British monarchy.

I think every day, more and more, we are learning that that is the correct opinion to have. But it is interesting how that is. It's written by Peter Morgan, who I think is really talented. And it's fiction. It's his interpretation. And he has a lot of people. He has decades worth of gossip and much of it verified. And it's all based on things that, quote, happen.

But it's interpretation. And there was like a real kerfuffle in the fall when the first Princess Diana season came out. And it was like pretty unflattering. And there was a whole thing in the British press about like it's really important that this be labeled as fiction. And it's really important that everyone understand that this is interpretation and that, that people, this is, this is not what actually happened and you can't hold people responsible for this. And then what's been really interesting is that since the Harry and Meghan Oprah interview, which we don't have to go down that road, except to say they basically start, the crown is then being again, used as

fact because it's interpretation and some of the spin that it puts on these situations is more in line with what people took away from the Harry, Megan, Oprah situation. So I, even as I'm like, I think it's fine because everyone knows what's fact and what's fiction. I mean, that's obviously just a lie that I made. So I think it's a slippery slope. I don't know what my answer is. It's interesting. I just think it's more fun to gossip about people than anything else. And that's what makes it a good genre.

There's personal, intimate interpretation. And then there's cultural reception too. And with biopics too often, what's shown in a biopic is received as fact and not interrogated. And that's what ultimately, that probably circles back a little bit to the Adam Curtis conversation about the way that we process information that we receive from media and then regurgitate it or act against it or act with it. But to me, the only biopics that really truly work are the ones that distort. And in fact, those that distort most aggressively are the ones I like the best. We did an episode about biopics earlier this year,

and we talked about the idea of the Trojan horse biopic, the movies that use a biopic structure to shepherd in different kinds of ideas or storytelling formats. And the Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes movie, I'm not there. That's my preference. If we're going to do it, I would rather it just be this sort of interpretive piece that looks at various touch points from someone's life and then tells a totally different kind of a story. The idea of telling the story of Ray Charles in a very A to B, cradle to grave way is dull to me and it's not really meaningful or reflective necessarily of the

complexity of someone's life. I don't know if I would consider the Tom Haynes Dillon movie a biopic. It's not, but it is. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's somebody's in it. It's about a character. I mean, to me, like, I guess I have a pretty strict framework of what a biopic means. It's sort of like, and, and there's almost like a hard ceiling

on how good it can be because of that because it's sort of an impossible task it's like seeing someone's entire life or a part of their life and uh okay here's another related question in in uh uh the tarantino movie it's the most recent one. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Yes. So Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor and he's in all these little television shows when he's young that are not exact.

They're not real shows. They're sort of shows of that nature. So are those replaced shows that did exist or did they exist alongside the shows they're like? I think that is just literally a question for for quentin because there are real shows in that in that film too you know the show that he is appearing in with um timothy oliphant that is a real show and they're essentially recreating a real episode of a real show with different actors portraying real actors but then there are and plus the story of the movie itself ends in a way that is different than the reality we know yes so all of the history

of television could be different and yet the sensibilities people have about television are the same so it's like a different kind of universe where the pieces are all different but the uh sort of like the the texture and the atmosphere is identical like that's a real interesting question i mean i i don't know maybe this isn't interesting like i i'm sure like i don't know it's like it's interesting to me i don't know why it is i don't know. It's interesting to me. I don't know why it is. I don't know why I'm so fixated on this, but it just seems like the idea of fictions inside of other fictions is a fun thing to worry about, but also an incredibly complicated way to sort of then absorb the movie and i do think it if somebody is like well you know uh why why should this matter like why should it matter if a character can see himself or herself or whatever in a different movie i i don't think it does matter, but I think it does raise a question

about the way the person looks about, watches film in general. Like when you watch a movie, is there things there that you can't see? Or is the movie only what we see? Is it only what's on the celluloid or on the videotape that's the movie? Or is there a whole other world outside of that

that we have to consider or at least understand to exist? Unless we're talking about a serialized story that is expanding beyond what's being told, I always view a movie as a locked experience. And I think that it is like, yes, it's almost like looking at a snow globe. Everything that happens here happens here and nothing outside.

This is where it all comes back to snow globes. The whole St. Elsewhere thing. You guys are familiar with this. Explain it. Okay. In the last episode of the TV, cause it was an NBC TV series called St.

Elsewhere in the eighties. Okay. It was a pretty good show. It was, I think it was on the same night as LA Live, if I recall. They were back to back. Pretty good cast of people who ended up becoming pretty significant stars, kind of went through it. And it was about a hospital called St. Allegius in Boston.

One of the characters that kind of appears about midway through the series is a little autistic boy. He's like the grandson of one of the hospital administrators. And in the very last episode, in the season finale of St. Elsewhere, very famously, everything kind of gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until you realize that this little, in the very last scene, this little autistic boy is staring at a snow globe that has the hospital inside. And that means that, you know, and like the hospital administrator is not actually a hospital employee. He's just an old guy. It suggests that the entire show we have seen, everything about St. Elsewhere is this dream that came from this autistic boy. This autistic boy looks into the snow globe and he sees an entire history of this world and it's all fictional,

but it then creates this incredibly complex rippling effect. Like there are characters on St. Elsewhere who went into, crossed over into the series Cheers. They go into the bar and they talk to the people at Cheers. But if St. Elsewhere as a show is the dream of an autistic boy, those characters are also part of the dream, which means the existence of Cheers is also a dream. It never actually existed. It was just an extension of this little boy's fantasy, which of course means then the show Fraser doesn't exist at all because, you know, and every show that crosses over and there's, and there's a scene in St. Elsewhere. I haven't seen this in years,

but I can still remember there was a character from the white shadow who then appeared as like an orderly on, on, on St. Elsewhere. And there's another character from the white shadow who then appeared as like an orderly on on on saying elsewhere and there's another character from the white shadow who's like makes a guest appearance for like four episodes and within one episode these two characters cross and one of the characters recognizes the other guy as somebody he went to high school with and the other character's like what the hell are you talking about like the character's name is salami i I think. And the character who's on the show recognizes him and the character's like, ooh, walks away or whatever. But the whole idea is if Saint Elsewhere is a dream, then any show or relationship connected to Saint Elsewhere is also a dream. And that means hundreds of

television shows don't actually exist well what you're suggesting more closely resembles an episode of the twilight zone or wandavision which amanda i know you didn't finish but this is also how wandavision essentially reveals that she is a person that is controlling the experiences of all of the people in a town and it's not a dream really it's a nightmare which takes me around to adam curtis and one of his most important movies which is called the power of nightmares and exposes the idea that everything that is happening in the world may in fact be this manifestation of nightmarish tendencies of those in power and so the truth is there is no truth there's only what you're perceiving when you're watching this stuff.

So ultimately, Amanda, when you watch something, is it a snow globe? Is it a dream? Is it a microverse? I'm still stuck on the character is, I think, named Salami, which I would love to go back to. He was the only white player on the team. Okay. Yes, he was the only white player on the team. He was the one white guy. And the guy who was in St. Elsewhere was the center.

I think his name is Coolidge or something. Coolidge. But now Coolidge on St. Elsewhere has a different name. And Salami has a different name. Okay. So it's like, I think, I mean, it's like it's, I mean, I'm literally just trying to, I don't know how many years. I mean, we're talking about stuff that most people listening to this show were not alive for, I would guess. I would guess most people listening to this podcast were born in the 90s or beyond. But I don't know. I guess it's just... Chuck, Chuck, let's close on this question. What do you believe? What do you think about your own theory? So what I think, when I see a movie, I think that the other movies do exist in that world. But of course, they have to be changed in some way like uh in the example i used earlier like this beach example that uh titanic does exist but now it's matthew mcconaughey who was like the second choice by cameron to be in the movie let's say he gets the role and it changes all these other movies okay and it changes people's lives

people who are just people going to the movie now don't go, or they go and they have a different experience that causes them to live differently. All these things change, but that's what explains how there can be this secret community on a beach. The reason Leonardo DiCaprio is able to go to this secret community that doesn't exist is because it does exist in this world. And the reason it exists in this world is because this world is different. And part of the reason it's different is because he was not in Titanic. And because he was not in Titanic, millions of other things are different

leading up to the existence of this place that can't be in our world, but can be in his. Fortunately, we also have a movie that explains this concept. It is called the butterfly effect. Chuck, I don also have a movie that explains this concept. It is called The Butterfly Effect. Chuck, I don't know how to even end this conversation. We could do it for another six hours, but I'm glad you shared it with us. I feel more open to the possibilities of movies.

Maybe people would like to listen to it for 12 hours a day. Well, you should call Adam Curtis then, Chuck. That's probably where we go. Thanks for doing this. Is there anything you want to plug anything you're pitching around nope love it love how you did that thanks for listening to the

big picture Amanda and I will be back later this week talking about more movies thanks Chuck thank you Bye.