The New Yorker Radio Hour - "Okja" and Other Strange Stories by Jon Ronson

Episode Date: June 30, 2017

Jon Ronson’s nonfiction has often seemed too strange to be true; in the screenplay for “Okja,” he goes all in for surreal fiction. Plus, Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

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building up into something more coherent. I think it'd be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country city divide. How about this weather? I know, it is so much weather right now. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I was considering staying home instead of dealing with all this weather.

No one can drive in this weather. As soon as weather comes, it's like people have never seen weather before. Do you remember yesterday's weather? Compare that to today's weather. It's like, are we even living in the same weather? Did you hear this morning? Record weather, and that's not even if you count weather. Speaking of weather, did you see that hilarious video where animals react to weather?

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Bam! Weather! Used to be whether it was weather or weather. We would say, well, weather, and just keep on at the weather. I guess that's where the saying comes from. If you don't like the weather, weather, weather, weather, weather, weather, weather, weather, weather, weather. Wow, weather. I know the feeling.

That's a piece by Ryan Kahn's from the New Yorker's Daily Shouts column. It was performed by Chiracot Dunlap and Christian Achimovich. And I'm David Remnick. Today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we've got a special invitation for you. we're going to a very exclusive, very swank party at Mar-a-Lago. The resort in Palm Beach where Donald Trump played golf this winter and conducted affairs of state, possibly at the same time. That's later this hour.

John Ronson is a journalist who's worked very productively on the weird side of the street. He's covered subjects that you think really can't exactly be true. He's written about conspiracy nuts. who believe space alien lizards walk among us. He wrote about the Pentagon's experiments with psychic powers, and one book covers his years playing keyboards for a bandleader who performed in a giant paper-miche head. Still, those things were true.

John Ronson's first completely fictional project has just come out. He co-wrote the screenplay for a new movie called Ogcha, with the director Bong Junho. June Ho is from South Korea, and is most known in the United States as the man behind the absolutely terrifying movie, the host, as well as Snowpiercer, but he's been making movies for over 20 years.

In my first meeting with Bong, he didn't want to tell me anything. He was very guarded. His idea had lived between him and his producer, Dooho, and Tilda Swinton and Tilda's partner, the artist Sandra Copps. The four of them had lived with this as a kind of secret for a couple of years. And then I was to be the fifth person,

and brought into it. And what was the secret? That it was going to be a film about a giant pig, the size of an elephant, and the pig gets kidnapped by an evil corporation run by Tilda Swinton. And the little girl, the pig's best friend is the little girl called Meager, and Meja has to use her wiles to get her pig back. I want your honest answer. When you first heard the secret, what the story was to be about, what was your reaction?

I said, I definitely want to be involved. I'm all in. Count me in. Pigs or no pigs, this is not a movie that's like Babe. It's more like Upton Sinclair's Jungle in some way. Thematically. Yeah, well, it has huge tonal shifts. It starts off as this kind of enchanting children's film of Medo and Okshire,

you know, playing about in the mountains of North Korea. And then it becomes a kind of slapstick satire, I guess, a little bit like, Terry Gilliams, Brazil, uh, with these hapless and the liberation front activists. We have a detailed plan on how to rescue her from the event in New York City. We promise to bring her back to you.

If our mission succeeds, we'll be able to shut down Miranda's Super Pig project completely. The Tilda Swinton plays this guy. She's this evil CEO, Tilda Swinton. 10 years in planning. On the cusp of a product launch that will feed millions. And what happens? We get tangled up in this terrorism thing,

and somehow we end up being the ones who look bad. Is it based on any CEOs that we know? Yeah, I gave a TED talk in 2012 when my book, The Psychopath Test, came out. And when I was in the audience, Regina Duggan, who was the head of DARPA, came on stage. DARPA is the U.S. military unit that invents the experimental weapons. So she comes on stage, and it's full of scientists, but they build weapons. So she comes on stage wearing a black polar neck like Steve Jobs and is very poised and very graceful.

And the first thing she says is you should be nice to nerds. And so we all, you know, sort of melt. And then she brings out a hummingbird, a robot hummingbird that floats over the audience. And everyone's looking up and gasping all these tech billionaires. It's beautiful, isn't it? Wow. And then it dawns on us kind of later. You know, what are they going to do with this robot having read?

It's like it's a drone that's going to kill people. And I thought that was extraordinary, yeah. And so I thought a lot about that with Tilda Swinton's character in Oaktier because the film starts with this wonderful set piece of Tilda giving this six-minute kind of TED talk where she's announcing her new endeavour. And it seems so lovely. It's so kind of, it's so woke. It's so Brooklyn.

Yeah, what it actually is is a livestock initiative to raise and kill magical pigs. Our super pigs will not only be big and beautiful. They will also leave a minimal footprint on the environment, consume less feed, and produce less excretions. And most importantly, they need to taste fucking good. It's two days before the film's reviews, but I actually have access to the advanced New Yorker review from one Anthony Lane, who concludes with the very short sentence, Occia is a pearl among swine. I'm telling you it's a rave. Excellent.

And you know what? The reason why people like this film is because Bong was allowed free reign to be auteurist. But this tells you a disastrous thing about movies today. Disasterous. It really does. I have a friend who writes screenplays And he says look I I go to meeting after meeting after meeting When it's about a film The answer is no

I go to meeting after meeting after meeting With television And sooner or later the answer is yes That the creative freedom in television Is comparatively immense And whereas with films Unless you're presenting

A Marvel comic A DC comic A very very conventional thing To get 15 year olds in the seats it's really difficult. Yeah, unless it's a really low-budget film when you can still get it made. But you're right.

I was getting these kind of reports back from when the screenplay, kind of fifth draft of the screenplay, was going around the studios, and it was all anxiety. Are you really going to shoot this slaughterhouse scene? Are you really going to have half the film in Korean? What's the film without the slaughterhouse?

Ah, it's a... It's flavorless. Yeah, it's, I mean, now I keep talking about slaughterhouse scene, but that's so representative of everything that's so wonderful about this film because it's this, you know, it's this funny popcorn movie with slapstick and chase scenes. Then it becomes truly haunting and disturbing and very moving. And all of those things are the things that the studios, the big studios would have cut out. You know, I went to a screening quite recently and there's a scene towards the end, which is so, and all around me in the cinema, people were sobbing. It's the scene where Medea goes inside the slaughterhouse and is confronted with the reality. And as much as I love of a movie, like Linklater's Fast Food Nation, which I love very much,

that's not a movie that makes you cry. No, it's a polemical movie. Yeah, and this is not a polemical movie. Your most recent book, which I read is amazing. It's called So You've Been Publicly Shamed, and it's about all the instances of shaming, particularly on social media, with the very notable anecdote of that young woman

who wrote a very, very bad joke about AIDS in Africa before going on a trip to Africa. And by the time she landed there, she'd become a pariah, an international pariah. And it seems to me that the debates had incited over free speech and social media, political correctness, and all the rest, have only become more fervent

since you published that book a couple of years ago. So how do you see your book now? Well, the first great Twitter shaming was the Justine Sacco one, which was the one you allude to. Before that, I think what happened was we realized we had power. If a daily male columnist, if some right-win columnist wrote something racist or misogynistic, we could do something about it. We could shame that person. And we'd notice that the daily mail would lose advertising or, you know, these were like, you know, these felt like good times. Like the egalitarian.

And then we talked it a little bit further So if a company did some... You say we, by the way. Yeah, I was one of those people. I remember just a little thing, but I remember a gym called LA Fitness refused to cancel the membership of a pregnant woman. And we shamed LA Fitness

and they immediately backtracked. We thought, whoa, this is amazing. But then what happened was like, we fell in love with it so much. We fell in love with writing wrongs so much. that a day without a shaming felt like a day kind of picking our fingernails. And so we lowered our standards. So it was like a narcotic effect.

Yeah. We loved it. And then somebody like Justin Sacco came along, who all she was actually, it was a terrible joke, but all she was actually trying to do was be like South Park or Randy Newman, tell her kind of a joke mocking her own privilege. And the joke was. And it backfired in the most colossal way. Most colossal way, while she was asleep on a plane.

And the fact that she was asleep on a plane and oblivious to her destruction fueled people even further. And I just thought, whoa, if this was an actual trial, we are trying and convicting somebody before they even know it's a trial. Do you follow Donald Trump's Twitter? Yes. In fact, Donald Trump was one of the people who was shaming Justine Sacker that night. He was one of the people who powered onto her. And what do you make of him? How do you read him, his Twitter personality?

Well, this is the thing. See, I think on Twitter, every side of us polluted the waters. We all polluted the waters. And then I think Donald Trump emerged from these polluted waters like a kind of mutant fish. From the milieu that we all created. And it wasn't just the right, doing it to the left. It was everyone. You've also written about extremists.

He wrote a book about extremists. and one of the subjects was someone who's now even better known, Alex Jones. And Megan Kelly just interviewed Alex Jones for network television. She was accused of giving him, quote unquote, giving him oxygen. What did you make of all that? Well, I mean, so I should backtrack slightly. I gave Alex Jones probably his first interview. Back in the mid to late 90s, I wanted to sneak in.

to this secret club in Northern California called Bohemian Grove, where conspiracy theorists think that's where the ruling elite have their human sacrifices and so on. But I didn't want to go on my own because basically if I fail to get in, it would just be me sitting in a motel room in Northern California. Not getting the story. Not getting the story. So I thought, what if I can go in? If I don't get in with Alex Jones. And I'd met Alex Jones a few months earlier. How did you meet him in a diner just over scrambled eggs? No, I'm in front of a bonfire at David Koresh's Church at Waco. You get around.

I really do. I went to Waco with Randy Weaver from the Ruby Ridge tragedy. And when I was there, Alex Jones was personally rebuilding David Koresh's church. And he was only 26 years old, but he was so charismatic. I knew he was going to be something. So I asked Alex to come with me, and it became like a big story for him. He brought out a documentary called. called Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove.

I kind of forgot about Alex for several years. And then suddenly I'm at the gym. And Trump's giving a stump speech. And this was at the period when it was all so new and strange, I immediately plugged in my headphones to hear what crazy Trump who's never going to be president. Had to say. Had to say.

And it was somebody shouted from the audience, are you going to go back on the Alex Jones show? And Trump went, Alex Jones, nice guy. I couldn't believe. I nearly fell off my elliptical. It's a title of your next book. And anyway, the Megan Kelly thing.

So, as you can probably tell from the people that I've interviewed over the years, I don't really believe in no platforming people. Because I feel like, you know, you'll always find people who don't deserve a platform. But if we start doing it all the time, it just becomes unlikable. People move away from us. But I do think that there's very limited appeal in doing what Megan Kelly did to Alex Jones, which was just sit him down and talk to him for an hour. Because you can do one of two things with that.

Alex Jones will basically walk all over you because he's so good at it. But that's not what happened with Megyn Kelly instead. Every time it cut to Megan Kelly, she was being very poised and like, no, Alex, you're wrong. You'll be very, very wrong. And every time it cut back to Alex, he's like sweating and stammering. You think she got the best of him? Well, I think they edited it. The combination of writing about social media conspiracy theories,

and now we live in the age of Trump, what does it make you think about what's happened to us? Have we gone nuts in some way? Yeah, all the worst people, when I say by worst, I suppose, I mean the most extreme, the most trenchant people I've interviewed him in power now, Ian Paisley, the head of the Democratic Unionist Party in the United Kingdom, I spent time with him who believed that the IRA I'm in league with the Pope to secretly rule the world. And his right-hand man was ahead of the Save Ulster from Sodominy campaign.

His party is now in alliance with the British Conservative Party. Alex Jones has White House credentials and he's close to Trump. What's your next project? When you think about you've just done something. both fun and unusual but also political. You're at the film. Where do you propel yourself next? Well, I'm just finishing a project that's taken me the last year.

It's called The Butterfly Effect, and it's another look inside the slaughterhouse, as I think my, so you've been publicly shamed book is, and Oakshire is. And this is about the adult industry. And the slaughterhouse in this case is the way that hundreds of millions of people now watch their porn for free on streaming services like Porn Hub and don't think about the consequences. Like nobody cares when music's being bartered, and this is porn. So no one cares.

What are the consequences? All the monies flowed from the San Fernando Valley, which is where the world's porn has been made all of these years into the pockets of the tech giants. A porn star can't get a checking account because they're deemed unrespectable, whereas a tech giant who wants to create a streaming service to host pirated porn can get a $362 million loan from a hedge fund. The consequences are extraordinary. I'll give you two examples very quickly. One is pretty much every child in the world gets to learn about sex with porn hub these days, 10, 11, 12 years old. So one of my stories is about a kid in Oklahoma with autism who was trying to impress a girl but didn't know how to do it because he's autistic so he aped something that he heard in a porn movie,

some dialogue, very disturbing dialogue that he heard in a porn movie and text it to her and he's now on the Sex Offentist Registry for 25 years. I'm going to counter that with an upbeat example, which is a lot of porn producers who don't make any money anymore because all the money's gone to the tech giants have created a new industry in the valley

and it's the world of bespoke porn. They will make an entire porn film for one person to their most specific predilections. And I thought that was just fascinating. I've spent a lot of time in the world of bespoke porn lately because it's such an incredible window into people's inner lives what films they would commission if they could commission like any porn film in the world.

John, you never cease to amaze, to entertain, and to capture our interest. I really appreciate your being here. David, I'm glad to have come in. Thank you. That was John Ronson. The film he co-wrote Okcha is streaming now on Netflix. And his new podcast is called The Butterfly Effect. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week on the show, we've got interviews and live performances with two giants of American

song, Lucinda Williams and James Taylor. The idea of that song is, it was sort of like one-note samba. It's just that and then it, the changes. The harmony shape. Underneath it, and that's a very Brazilian, very Jobine thing to do. So I was hugely impressed by that stuff. And... Unbelievable you.

Impossible me. Who fell out of the family fellow who found the philosopher's stone deep in the soul bone. Who fell in the you and according to you with a tear in your eye for the fourth of your life for life for the... James Taylor. Taylor. Don't miss it. Now we're going to close the show today with a terrific poet, the poet laureate of the United States as of a couple of weeks ago, Tracy K. Smith. The first piece of hers we published in the New Yorker not long ago was a poem about

Levan Helm of the band, which really wore my heart. And today Tracy is going to take us on a little journey near her home into the woods. We are at my home in Princeton, New Jersey right now, and we're heading into what is known as the common land or the common wood. that sits in this neighborhood, which is called the Grey Farm neighborhood. And it, that's my dog, who's jealous that she's not coming. And it leads out to Lake Carnegie. We're walking along like a bed of bark, this path,

and there's some tree stumps that have been lined up to create like a little guide to the path. To the right, we see some of the houses that look out onto the lake. You can see the bridge up ahead. The car's going into town. Up to the left. One of our neighbors planted, I think, thousands of daffodil bulbs. So we'll pass those.

Some people have what my kids call bamboo forests. You'll see some neighbors up here have bamboo at the back of their property. And it's just kind of this open space. I loved being a young, writer in New York and having my community of people and our sense of a hunger and excitement. And then I had kids and my father died. So we left New York City and moved here. And I had a little bit of, I was anticipating having heartbreak about leaving Brooklyn

where I lived for so long and was so happy. And then I came here. And I was like, oh my God, this is the real world. Like there are these trees that are just electrically green. And I feel like something in me has changed as a result. Like my, I don't know, I feel like the trees are doing more than just giving oxygen. I think there are these old souls that kind of console in different ways. And so there's something beautiful about this as a backdrop of what feels like a new beginning

or the beginning of what comes after youth. And maybe I feel sort of consoled by the fact that the landscape just keeps going, despite all of the things that we do. That's really been the really most beautiful surprise of being here, how much silence and green space has fed the inner silence that I think most writers are seeking. I had a teacher once who

Linda Gregg, the poet Linda Gregg who said, if you are suffering from writer's block, it's really just anxiety that's keeping you from being quiet. If you're quiet, after about 15 minutes, your mind is

imaginative enough to come up with an idea to prevent boredom. And I feel it's so true in my 20s. I couldn't write. I had so much anxiety about what people were saying what my classmates and teachers were saying about what I was writing that I just kind of stopped for about nine months, which really hurt. And my strategy at that time was to take a photography class just to be doing something creative and learning to look at things through that lens.

And I think it helped bring me back to the page because I recognized something I hadn't quite articulated to myself before, which was that an image can do such. amazing lyrical work and it can free you from the need to make statements and explain if you can just describe a feeling can emerge that the reader can't help but participate in and um before that I thought poems were a series of wise statements but that someone who had discovered things laid out one after another and so I was no wonder I had writer's block I could figure figure out maybe one thing that seemed genuinely interesting, and then a couple of other things that were in imitation of a wise person, and then I couldn't get past that. The first thing I want to look for is something that has to do with a bird or something

natural. I feel like there's an effortless sense of clarity that I can locate in some of those types of sources. Yeah, sometimes what I know is, look, there's a deer. There's several. No matter how many times you see one, you still get that same feeling of, how lucky. I'm sorry, guys, we're bothering you.

Wow, I can't believe we made it back the way we came in. This almost never happens to me when I'm by myself. The poet Tracy K. Smith. You can find her poems in The New Yorker at new yorker radio.org. And that's it for today. Join us next week for James Taylor and Lucinda Williams. And until then, keep up with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. And have a great week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Michael Lee Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Jessica Henderson, and Eric Molinski. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.