The Press Box - Breaking: 'Ready Player One' Isn't the 'Black Panther' for Gamers | Damage Control (Ep. 447)

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

This week on 'Damage Control,' The Ringer’s Justin Charity and K. Austin Collins discuss the unrealistic expectations surrounding Stormy Daniels’s ‘60 Minutes’ interview (1:47), the obsession with creating nostalgia porn for millennials (18:33), and how ‘Ready Player One’ may not be as groundbreaking as gamers think (29:04). You can find the official Ringer web store here: http://bit.ly/ringershop More from The Ringer: Subscribe to 'The Recappables' The Hilarious Life And Agonizing Death of Online Comedy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, this is Justin Charity from Damage Control. I have some exciting news for all of you Ringer fans out there. The Ringer has new merchandise with a shiny new storefront that you can check out right now. Go to Theringer.com slash shop to pre-order your merch now. You can also find the link to the Ringer web store in the podcast description. While you're at The Ringer.com, go ahead and check out a great piece by our friends Alison Herman and Victor Luckison about the hilarious life and agonizing death of online comedy, sites like The Onion, funnier, and why we aren't going to them anymore. Check it out.

Season 3 of Bill Billions premiered on Sunday, Bill Simmons and Mallory Rubin are taking over the Recapables podcast each week to discuss the show. You can also find recaps of Donald Glover's show Atlanta on that feed, so be sure to subscribe. All right, and now on to damage control.

I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Cameron Collins. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Ready Player One. We're talking about Steven Spielberg's latest blockbuster based on a controversial novel by Ernest Klein. Ready Player One, both the book and the new movie, have provoked a lot of anxious discussions of gamer identity and nostalgia porn.

We're going to take a deep breath and we're going to talk it through. But first, we're talking about Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump's latest media antagonist. She appeared in 60 minutes last Sunday to tell Anderson Cooper all about her 2006 affair with Trump and the president's subsequent attempts to intimidate her and buy her silence. We're going to talk to that, too. You feel like if you had wanted to go public, you could have gotten paid a lot of money to go public in an interview. Without a doubt, I know for a fact.

I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, in my heart, and some people argue that I don't have one of those, but whatever, that I was doing the right thing. I turned down a large payday multiple times because, one, I didn't want to kiss and tell and be labeled all the things that I'm being labeled now. I didn't want to take away from the legitimate and legal, I'd like to point out,

career that I've worked very hard to establish. And most importantly, I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she's being exposed to right now. Because everything that I was afraid of coming out has come out anyway. And guess what?

I don't have a million dollars. You didn't even buy me breakfast. So you just heard Stormy Daniels speaking with Anderson Cooper. On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran this interview with Daniels, who recounted her 2006 affair with Donald Trump. Now, this isn't the first time Daniels has spoken at length about the affair. The 60 Minutes interview actually covers a lot of details that were revealed several months ago

when In Touch magazine published a previously unreleased 2011 interview with Daniels. But Cooper pressed Daniels and her attorney, Michael Avanotti to describe Trump's attempts to suppress news of Trump's affair with Daniels since October 2016, so a month before the presidential election. So Daniel says that the president and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, have threatened to harm her and her family if she continues to speak publicly about the affair with Trump. And so the scandal here isn't just that Daniels and Trump had sex and that Trump had an affair. It's also that this has become a story about abuses of power.

It's become a story about Trump's volatile relationship with women and how he dehumanizes women and bullies women and intimidates women. In all of this, Stormy Daniels has become, among Trump's critics, I would say, this sort of champion figure. She's kind of a successor to James Comey in a lot of ways, at least as far as media narratives go. Still, because Stormy Daniels is a porn star, the intrigue surrounding her has taken on a sort of charged, polarized tone, as Trump's critics disagree over whether a sex scandal is high on the list of priorities when it comes to scrutinizing Trump and his behavior, especially if you compare the Stormy Daniels affair to something like the Russia investigation. So, Cam, let's start with the 60 Minutes interview. It's seen as this watershed moment for the public profile of Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels is just one of very big.

many women to come out and have these sort of grotesque stories about Donald Trump. Why is she made this sort of meaty attraction, I think, where others haven't? That's what I want to walk through. Are you suggesting that some of this might have to do with American Puritanism? So we go. I mean, you know, this one, this is hard. This is another, for me, example of a moment where, you got to wonder, like, am I in the Matrix or not?

Like, is this something that matters a lot to the media narrative, that matters to people who follow a lot of media people on Twitter, et cetera, but that doesn't seem to be having traction with the public broadly? And should we be making a difference, a distinction, between how the media is talking about this and how the public is sort of interpreting it or not, as in the case of many Trump scandals? this seems to be interesting for people because of the sex part that is clearly not what's damning here.

And I think there's an extent to it. I'm not saying that this conversation has not been serious. I'm saying that some of the journalists that you see on Twitter, like it's as if they're trying to meet a quota of how many times they can say porn star in a day or tweet the phrase porn star. It's like not even, it's like we know who Stormy Daniels says at this point. You don't have to say a porn star in your tweet. But but that's the thing.

the part that we seem to be fixated on in some ways. That is a part that people obviously want to use to sort of discredit her story. And that's sort of why I'm like, I like, you know, like. Well, I don't think it's just people who want to discredit Stormy Daniels who are hung up on it. No, totally. Totally. Totally. Totally.

Right. It's even, I would go so far as to say, even critics of people who are the people who are overusing the characterization of porn star, in a way, those people. are in a galaxy brain sort of way hung up on the idea of like how we talk about porn stars. Yes. Right. And it's like basically no faction in all of this is really allowing Stormy Daniels to sort of primarily exist as a person who is trying to provide just an honest account of an unethical

encounter she had with Donald Trump. Yes. Right? Like unethical on Trump's part. And in a lot of ways that's sort of on the one hand, it sort of, I do think it. contributes to the traction that the story has gotten, right? Because she's... Stormy Daniels is this...

She's a larger-than-life figure in a way that a lot of other Trump critics and Trump accusers, frankly, are not. And that is her... That's her advantage in media. Like, the fact that she has... I mean, the real success of Stormy Daniels is that despite the fact that a lot of people have alleged a lot of misconduct against Donald Trump, she has this very cany media sense about her. She knows how to do an interview. She knows how to, she knows his world.

You know what I mean? This is a Hall of Fame porn star. Right. Like I had to, I mean, you know, I'm not straight. So I had to, before all this, actually, she's not, she's not a porn star who for me has crossed over into sort of a queer mainstream. Right. So I had to look her up.

And she's a big deal. She would, of course, be extremely charismatic. And I, hats off to her for knowing how to sort of win this. But I think part of the reason that she, I mean, she's accusing Trump of something a little bit, I mean, a lot of bit different than what his other accusers are accusing him of. His accusers are alleging a sort of level of sexual misconduct that she is not. That's important to know. And that's an important part of not only the way that she's able to sort of perform. in the media, but also I think of how the media gets to be, have a little bit more fun treating this salaciously.

Yeah. Because she is not, you know, she's not alleging like something like sexual assault. This is not like, you know, this is not the grabber by the pussy tape. She's, she's recounting how she and Trump had sex and she thought, if anything, it was just sort of hilarious. And that all of the dark stuff here is the legal intimidation and sort of innuendo of physical intimidation that followed. from that. That's what the real story is in the Sturme Daniels case. You know, look, we write for the internet, we understand our headlines work, we understand that if you call us a porn star story, you're more likely to get people to click.

For a number of reasons, obviously this is a president. America is a country that loves political sex scandals. I mean, we just, we will never get past that as a nation, I don't think. The problem for me is how we've all sort of diluted ourselves into this rhythm of thinking that something is a smoking gun every single time, the thing that's going to take Trump down. And I think that the porn star part of this is another, you know, adds weight to that for people. Like not only, this is not just like stepping out on your wife. This is not just, you know, having an affair. This is not just paying someone off. This is with a porn star.

You know, it's very much like, it satisfies all the things that we don't really know about JFK and Marilyn Monroe, right? Like, it's that kind of, it's that kind of story. for people and I just, this is a very Loch Ness monster for me. It's like the head will emerge from the water, we'll take our photo, and then we'll never see it for another hundred years. And so we have this little bit of proof and it goes nowhere. That to me is the rhythm of the smoking gum when it comes to this presidency. And that's why I sort of can't, I can't let myself be involved in sort of the emotional,

like psychological fun. An investment. Yeah, because it's just like, you know, look, how many New York Times, a lot of I'm going to get a day about this Russia investigation, and still this dude is our president. So it's like, you know, for me, it's just like, this is not exciting to me. Yeah. And to me, it hurts that her nearest analog, if we're talking about obstruction of Trump's presidency, her nearest analog really is James Comey, right?

James Comey, you know, from a very, from a different background, obviously. But like, James Comey was this figure who emerged and who not only had receipts. about Donald Trump, but also emerged with this Supreme Media Canney that, yeah, I remember thinking and I remember a lot of other people thinking when Kannie, when Comey first came out swinging against Trump after he was fired as FBI, you know, at the FBI, his ability to sort of draw, inform on background and sort of drive the news cycles against Trump and make Trump like kind of an idiot. That was this moment where everyone was like, James, Comey is super effective.

And Stormy Daniels is getting that treatment now. We talk about Stormy Daniels as somebody who is very effective at opposing Donald Trump. And the thing that's strange about it is Stormy Daniels' effectiveness is a media phenomenon. But importantly, it's not, at least not yet, it's not a political phenomenon. Right. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like one. Right.

Right. Right. Even though there are these campaign finance violation sort of implications as to what Stormy Daniels is saying about, so basically, her signing a nondisclosure agreement at one point to prohibit her from talking about Trump and her signing that nondisclosure agreement a month before the presidential election, right? This has a bunch of implications about whether the money paid out, whether it's from Michael Cohen or from Donald Trump, whether the money paid out is a violation of campaign finance law. That's sort of the closest. we've got right now to a sense that like a terminal legal failure on Trump's part. But otherwise, yeah, it seems like the effectiveness of Stormy Daniels is really just about the ability to generate headlines. And it's not actually about anything practical. What is going to be eternally funny to me is that nothing is really a good headline in the context of this president and this presidency. If Obama not to be like not to be not to be my mom. But this is, look, this is exactly what she's talking about on the phone every time we talk.

If Obama had stepped out with a lot, porn star, in the context of his presidency, this would be a whole different kind of, you know, the salaciousness would be even worse. Like the impact on the conversation publicly, culturally would be having to be even wilder. And they would have found a way to impeach him somehow, frankly, right? It would have been a very smooth process. And just with this guy, it's just like, look, before he was elected, he was a fuck boy. So no matter how many receipts we come up with that in, I don't know. Like, give me the Shondaland version of someone throwing the book at him and, you know, him getting hit by a bus at the end of the episode or something. Give me, like, give me, give me that.

I don't, I don't need this. This is just, this is just teasing me with something that's not really going to come to anything. Well, that said, we should talk about the expectations that people had. going into the 60 minutes interview. Yes, can we? Because there was some interesting. So basically, I noted this at the top that Stormy Daniels spoke to In Touch in 2011 about the affair and a few months ago, In Touch already released an extensive interview with Stormy

Daniels where she describes a lot of the affair and the sort of subsequent conversations over the years and relationships she had with Trump over the years. A lot of the details from that interview that a lot of us who are obsessed with this. already read. A lot of those details are just things she revisits in the 60 Minutes interview. Right. So ultimately, the 60 Minutes interview, I would say, is not, as a piece of television, it wasn't as gratifying as I think that people hoped because people went in. And people pretended. And people pretended. You know, they live tweeted the shit out of it. Like it was a TV show. Like, it was a

TV show. But I think it's because people went in with this sense that there was a building hype and there was building innuendo coming from the Stormy Daniels camp that Sturmy Daniels might have some even more tangible receipts. Right. There was a discussion of dick picks, potentially. Which remember that this affair happened in 2006, and you know, you have to keep in mind the phone technology involved in a lot of this stuff. Thank you for that very practical.

No, this is a very practical approach to this, to this, to this, whatever this is. It's a tech story, too. Yeah. It's a text story. Frankly, but continue, please. No, there was discussion of whether Stormy Daniels might have exceptionally vulgar evidence, basically, of the affair with Trump. And she didn't, the 60 Minutes interview did not yield that. Like, there was clearly a demand for that to happen.

And at that point of people thinking that that's what they're going to see on 60 minutes, which is the show all the old people are watching on Sunday. Right. I mean, it seems like that's. to see it, but let's not bear the lead. They want to see it. Right. Y'all want to see his dick so bad. Right, which is why I've never met a country of people who wanted to see a dick as bad as we want to see his dick.

Right. Or I'm saying we as in like my national affiliation to be clear. This is something that I actually do not want to see. Right. The popular will we. That we're so. Right. Just right.

I would just like to be left out of that narrative. But it's the same with the P tape. And, you know, like, I don't. I don't know what to say. I mean, I get why that would feel like a huge thing. But again, what does a dick Bitcoin to prove except that they had an affair? Right. Which we already know they had because I believe so many.

I have no reason to doubt her account. Anybody who walks out of the woodwork and says they slept with Donald Trump, I'm like, yeah, you probably did because who would admit to that, like if it weren't true? But like, but like why I think we as a nation need to sit back and think about why we want to see his dick. so bad. Like, is there a reason more pressing than just tangible confirmation, as you said, of this affair, which we actually don't need to prove? I want to know about the accusations of violence. A dick pick is not going to tell me. A dick pick is not going to tell me what his lawyer said to her. I get that we want to embarrass him. I think that, speaking of us being a tech story, as a nation of people who do not have a grasp on our own privacy, I think that we should all be

a little bit more careful about like wanting to leak people's dickbicks, frankly, to be honest with you, because once we open that door, like, listen, a lot of y'all are going to lose your job. So, you know, it's just like, why is this, why, again, why is this about the sex? Why is it about the sex? We didn't even get his tax returns at the end of that Rachel Maddow episode. Y'all think we're going to get his dick pick. Oh, man.

Yeah, I have to bring it up. You're right. I'm just saying, please, please, level your expectations. I will say that even the Watergate Hotel was not built in a day. And similarly, like, the Stormy Daniels affair is not the most fulfilling political scandal right now. But I would not count Stormy Daniels out. You're hearing Van Halen jump, which we are not playing arbitrarily, even though the movie Ready Player One uses it arbitrarily.

We are here to talk about Spielberg's new movie, Ready Player One. Before we dive into this, I just want to say up top that there are going to be some spoilers. So cover your ears if you care that much, because we're going to be talking about the plot quite a bit. I would like to start out just right up top with a little bit of violence. I would like to start with a headline. Please be warned. You may be caused to have a seizure or a violent fit from hearing this headline. I'm sorry, but we're here to talk you through it.

Here's the headline. Will Ready Player 1 be Black Panther for gamers? I know. This is from a heavy.com article written a couple of weeks ago about Ready Player 1 based in Ernest Klein's 2011 novel that I could not for the life of me get through, by the way. And the movie comes out this week. Charity, we saw it last night together. I'm pretty sure we both think the answer to that question in the headline is no, shut the hell up.

No, my answer is the Lucille Bluth. I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it. Precisely. But rather than just be trolled, which I think we're all, you know, I think we're all feeling a bit troll by that headline. But rather than just be trolled, I want to take a kernel of truth or something there and reframe it little. is ready player one black panther for gamers no but is ready player one black panther for the gen x and boomer nostalgics who currently have a stranglehold over american pop culture yes obviously a thousand times yes and this is charity this is what i want to talk to you about tell me why gen xers and boomers

right now and their childhoods are doing the darth vader chokehold just trying to choke me out until I don't have a culture of my own anymore. Tell me why they're trying to destroy art for me. Please. Well, Gen X has always been the Phantom Menace, right? They're always, like, as much as you might think of a young person going to see this movie, and you think, millennials, got it. This is a movie from millennials.

This is a millennial movie. It's easy to forget that, like, oh, wait, yeah, the people with all the money and control are boomers and now Gen Xers at this point. Right. And that's why things like this exist. That's why you have a futuristic movie that has a lot of modern gaming culture elements in it, but nonetheless is very, is ransacked and shot through with the 1980s. Right, right.

And led by Steven Spielberg. We should say, you know, we should talk about what the movie's about. It's a movie about a game designer played by Mark Rylance, who in the future, becomes the designer of the most immersive sort of world of games. Everyone's involved. It's great. It's a thing called the Oasis where people live virtually. They can be anything that they want to be.

They collect money. They put their down payments on their mortgages in there. And then when they die in this game world, they lose all their money. This is not sound attractive to me, but I'm just recounting the plot of the movie. So Mark Rylans dies, but he leaves these keys behind in the game that when you get the mall will unlock the game and you become the owner of the oasis, basically. And there's a whole corporation who's trying to get these keys. And then they're Scrably, like, you know, people from Middle America who are poor and destitute,

who are putting all their money into this to sort of win the keys as well. And so the thing is that this game designer kind of grew up in the 80s. So that's his cultural, that's his cultural, you know, touchpoint. And in order to kind of get through this game to win the competition, to win control over oasis. You have to sort of do a lot of biographical research of this guy to figure out where he's planting these clues. So in some, it is a movie and a book premised on an obsession with like the cult of genius of this guy. Unabashedly so, but maybe not everyone would describe it that way because everyone, it's played by Mark Rylent. He seems like a really cool guy. He needs a better haircut.

But other than that, he's like a very like a humble kind of a nice tech. CEO. Right. A benevolent tech CEO. Not the kind of guy who you'll expect to be like, I'm running for mayor from San Francisco to kind of put more cops on the streets. No, he's more like Zuckerberg's

weird, hilarious quest to become a real boy. I think he's better than Zuckerberg. Sure. Yeah. So this is the premise. And in order to pull this off, you're just, you know, the oasis is full of references. It's full of references to movies.

And not just stuff from the 80s. But you can't help but feel like it is all overwhelmingly playing up the childhood stuff, the same stuff that stranger things plays in, that literally everything else that we've been calling nostalgic these days plays in. When you talk about nostalgic, we're not talking about nostalgia for Lion King even, or Little Mermaid even. We're talking about more purely the 80s and earlier. Is that fair? Yeah, it definitely skews Gen X. Again, despite whatever pretensions of being a sort of high.

or a millennial movie. It really skews. And, you know, part of that is, in the plot, it's rationalized by the fact that Halliday, who's, you know, the late game designer, the beloved game designer, Halliday, again, is specifically a child of the 80s and everybody is really more than they're obsessed with modern gaming culture. They're obsessed with him. Right.

And that includes millennials who are obsessed with him. And the fantasy of freedom that comes with this, we should say, like, one of this guy's big things is he doesn't want to put too many rules on the world of the oasis. He wants it to be sort of this utopic virtual world. And it's a great idea. It's kind of a beautiful idea. And Spielberg sort of represents it very nicely, I think. But I am over nostalgia.

Well, are you over nostalgia in general? because this movie's version of nostalgia is this movie, I should say, like we're talking about how it's a blend of different references and things like that, but it's an overload, and it's by design, but it's very much supposed to be

the Vegas buffet of gaming culture references. Well, yes. Yes. The climax of the movie is literally a full-blown, like, mashup of every single video game character you've ever seen in your life

converging in like a brave heart rush to the end of the movie. Plus movie characters and other things. It's like, for me, what is interesting about this is the extent to which this is a project about saying

that gaming culture is as fundamental to our kind of monoculture as movies are so that you can have these video game references like Overwatch, et cetera, and Halo next to King Kong and Chucky, Jurassic Park, Godzilla, all these things. It's like saying, like, gaming, you are a part of the culture, too.

This is, I think, what people are not particularly eloquently or elegantly or elegantly gesturing at when they say, you know, is this like Black Panther for gamers? It's a sort of like a, it's true. It's like a, there's a cultural canon, and now we're saying that gaming and all those references are a part of it. Now we're saying the logic of knowing all the secret codes and all these things is as essential to culture as everyone's seeing King Kong and knowing what that is. Yeah, you're right. It's like that integration is such a part. I mean, again, the first big set piece, there's this race with countless competitors, all driving cars and the super advanced track modeled after Manhattan.

Right. And yeah, the star of that set piece is King Kong. Right. And like Donkey Kong's a character, but that's not the character they chose. It shows King Kong. And like that's sort of the thing that that's sort of your tell that like Spielberg isn't just like there. There is something about how people talk about this movie as if it is it is purely game pandering. And I think that's why your angle on it is like being annoyed at Chinx is so much more interesting.

Because I think otherwise the way people read. Ready Player 1, but the source material in the movie is that it really just exists to pander to reactionary gamers. But it's actually pandering to a more, to a broader, I think deeper sort of reactionary sensibility that is applicable to way more stretches of American culture than people want to let on. Yeah. Can we talk about that? Because I'm, you know, currently, you know, writing about this movie, my piece will be up tomorrow.

I am trying to wrap my mind around, particularly people writing online when they're doing this sort of like, I feel seen by Ready Player 1. It's interesting to me because I'm not part of the gaming world. So I'm biased toward whatever sort of leaks into the mainstream. But I'm rolling at my sleeves right now. You know, I know what GamerGate is. I know and I understand the extent to which sort of, you know, no. nerd culture or whatever you want to call it, the problems of like the reactions to, for example, the Ghostbusters remake, things like that, fell on the shoulders of nerd culture.

And so I'm sensitive to this idea that there's a, I mean, well, first of all, I mean, nerd culture did sort of fuck that one up and y'all weren't, y'all were really acting out of turn about just like an all-lady ghostbusters, to be clear, I think you were in the wrong with that one. But what I'm saying is like there's an ease with which we keep repeating this sort of need. for revenge of the nerds scenario. But I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to help me. I'm just,

I'm just trying to understand why nerd culture feels so embattled that we'd even be in a situation to be saying that nerd cultural needs a black panther. Yeah. And I don't want to paint with a super broad brush because there are definitely progressive

and leftist elements of nerd culture. And I don't want to just seed that to the more reactionary factions. But there is a sense in which the logic of the type of nerd fandom you're talking about is exactly the logic and language of certain types of conservatism in America, right? It's this permanent, aggrieved, embattled posture from people who are clearly the people with all the power.

Right. It's the people who are dominant pretending that they are the most downtrodden people on earth. Right. Right. And that's what you get with the sort of person, I think, who is susceptible to joining the ranks of gamer gay. Or is this sort of person who feels seen by Ernest Klein's original novel, right? And it's sort of, it's America is just, it's popular culture is in such a strange moment where, again, it's all of this art, all of this comic book culture, all of this nerd culture that, you know, I think at a different time maybe was more legitimately marginal.

It's just so obviously not marginal now. Right. Like even if you're going to invoke Black Panther in that, it's like, yeah, that's like, yeah, that's. another thing where it's like you're talking about like it's not gaming but Black Panther itself is nerd culture you know what I mean? It's not like Black Panther is otherwise unrelated

to Ready Player 1 like it's all I mean again a lot of I think hip hop is nerd culture in a way but if we're talking about like classical nerd culture as classically understood by people yeah there's something there's something totally loaded about gamer

as an identity Yeah, it feels like that as someone who's outside of the identity. And I'll now give you the counterpoint to that, which is like, I am a person who plays video games. I'm a person who has written about video games for the ringer.com. I have a lot of thoughts about video games. I specifically have a lot of thoughts about Holiday, the game design, in this movie, and I'm going to write about them at some point for the site. But that identity, gamer, is so loaded. And it's so, it skews so much toward the reaction or actions that I would never.

have never in my life described myself as a gamer. Yeah, right, right. Like, I can watch Ready Player 1, and there's some, I mean, I watched it with UKM, and there's one moment toward the end of the movie where I felt seen. You sure did. I sensed it. I sensed it happening right next to me. It was unfortunate.

It was wild. Although, I will say, it was a moment that had nothing to do with video games. Sure. Because I had to do with Godzilla. Yes. Ah, uh-huh. I had to do it. Yeah, sure.

Here's the thing for me. This sort of, this is all just inherently unsatisfying to me. You know, a movie that is entirely comprised or almost entirely comprised of references to things that I already care about has little value to me beyond its ability to curate things that it knows that I care about because they're the same things that appear on every best of the 80s playlist. They're the same things that always come up in the sort of like, do you remember X? Yes, we remember X. This thing got 15K retweets because we all. all remember X.

But you're going to put it in this movie. We're going to act like seeing this kid drive a DeLorean as somehow like a what? Like what? Yeah. You know, it's like from things like that onward, I'm just like, you know what? Fuck it. Like, I'm just not. I'm just, I'm not into it in part because too much of this is defining commerce right

now for me and pop culture right now. Too many throwbacks. Too much milking of the feeling that you get when a thing that you cared about when you cared about when you were younger sort of rearrives on the mainstream. A thing that you felt was maybe beyond the mainstream at first, a nerdy side thing, like Back to the Future kind of frankly. But it's like, everybody knows who Marty McFly is. You know, I don't know.

But do you think that that's all Spielberg is doing with this movie? I think the movie is a bit smarter. No, I think he's doing other things. But I think it's two and a half hours of that, no matter what else he accomplishes. Yeah. And just like, Stranger Things has been. two seasons of that, no matter other things that accomplishes. And so I'm sitting through hours and hours of things that people who are older than me

care about more than I do, that I maybe would care about more. Although, I think if I were Gen X, I would also be tired of me. Gen X is self-obsessed to never be tired of time. Is it not? Is it like, is it not, frankly? You know, I don't know. Like, when do we forget the 80s such that we have to keep never forgetting the 80s? hashtag never forget.

Never forget what? Van Halen? Like, but to your point about just like the weirdness of these references, the fact that the movie starts with a song like Van Halen's jump. This is not happening in the movie. This is not a thing you can directly attribute to Halliday or the kinds of clues that you need to sort of solve the puzzle of winning this game. This is just the movie starting off with this song.

Doesn't that sort of tell you that it is just about easy references, that it's not really about what it means necessarily to the characters? I would a 20-year-old in 2047 care as much about the breakfast club as Mark Rylance's dead character cared. I don't care about Casablanca as much as my grandma does. It's a great movie, but it's like not, like, it's not the same kind of touchstone. I mean, you're saying it like, I mean, but that's the thing. It's, like, on its face, it's kind of preposterous until you think about how culture

is structured now. And it's like, oh, I guess I can't imagine a 20-40 whatever where, like. No. We're on our fifth rehash of the 80s. In 2040, they're going to be, I mean, if it's 2018 now and back to the future came out in the 80s, then in 2047, if we kind of keep on the same tempo of this, they're going to be obsessed with things that haven't come out yet. Yeah, except for the things that are going to come out in the period that would be covered by that are just going to be tributes to things from the... You see what I'm saying is a feedback loop. It's a paradox.

It's no, what it is a trash heap. What it is is a rabbit hole of bullshit. But I want to say that as much as, so you put it well when you say that no matter what ideas Spielberg is working with, the point is it's a two and a half hour movie. And that sort of barrage of references and pandering, it's so ammeshed in the movie itself that it, you have to take that even if there's something else there. In the smartest moments of the movie, I like to think that Spielberg is playing with the idea that thinking of culture that way is.

dumb. Early in the movie, there's a scene at the racetrack that I described and the female lead in the character, Artemis, you first see her and she's riding Conada's bike from Akira. And Parciful's way of observing her is, that's Conada's bike from Akira. You know what I mean? He does that. And it's sometimes like there are a lot of scenes like that in the movie. And they always sound so stupid at face value. Like the delivery sounds so, it sounds earnest in a way that I'm always thinking, is this inviting my ridicule and even the way that Artemis sort of initially treats Parciful in the movie, it's sort of like she, she's, it feels like she's in on the joke of the idea that thinking of culture this way is easy.

Until she starts to quiz him on Halliday's like favorite breakfast club quote or whatever the fuck. Until she reveals that she too is a part of the bullshit. Right. There's a weird alternation. There's a weird schizophrenic alternation where it's like sometimes the movie feels like it's on the side of gamers and sometimes it feels like Spielberg is not on the side of gamers. And there's a great, there's one great scene in the movie, I think, when Parcival is confronting,

my man, Ben Mendelsohn, the maid, he's great. Oh, he's, you know, they're having this weird confrontation. And it's at a point in the movie where Mendelsohn's really trying to convert Percival. And he has these people in his ear at his corporation who are whispering all these references that he knows that Parciful would just totally get off to, you know, he's talking about the breakfast club, and he says all of this shit. And Parciful recognizes that he's just being pandered to. But that doesn't change the upshot of the scene, which is that Mendelssohn's character has

just laid it out on the table, the idea that, look, if you just think, if you just let yourself be a sucker for a bunch of corporate figures sort of selling your own taste back to you and regurgitating things you already like at you, like, you're just going to fall for bullshit. Yes. And it's moments like that that make me think, uh, this movie is smarter than the person who will like this movie. Well,

that or the villain is smarter than the movie. Could this be another American blockbuster in which the villain is right? No, he's not right because he's the corporate stooge. But of course, like the character who says that is the corporate stooge. So it comes with a sense of like, it's a poison.

It's a poison pill. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, but his cynicism is like the fact that he knows to use that for monetary gain is like it is the essence of the movie, the movie as in a product that we saw in a theater that knows that people are going to see it because, first of all, going to see a popcorn movie with Steven Spielberg or a Steven Spielberg movie that makes a lot of money

is in itself nostalgic because that is not something that really happening in the 21st century. That, this phase of Stewart and Berg's career was the 80s and the 90s, was the Jurassic Parks and the Jaws and the Indiana Jones. It wasn't the BFG era, the Lincoln era, the Adventures of Tintin era, the Munich era, right? The post era. The Tintin era we all know and love. Right. It's like, it's nostalgic in a lot of ways.

And you know what, Spielberg can do whatever he wants. He can go on Twitter and do a cease and desist over a hamburger. He can literally do whatever he wants. but I just think the rest of us have got to like, at least for my sake, display more fatigue with this so that I can trust that we have not lost all of our minds. Like, be more wary over all the references in stranger things and in this and et cetera, et cetera. Just be a little bit more wary, just tweet about it more so that I at least can feel

like we are all a little bit more cynical than this because I'm tired. I'm really tired of this. this magic school bus tour of Gen Xer's childhoods that I've been on for a decade. I'm over y'all? Please, with the Frozen references. Give me something new. Yeah, yeah. Give us, yeah, Logan Paul, Frozen.

Right. We were doing last night. Give me Wally. You know, at least it's still cynical bullshit, but just update it a little bit. Please. Oh, my God. All right, that wraps this up. I'm Justin Charity.

I'm Cameron Collins. and this is my last episode of damage control, at least as a host. Oh, man. I am. Yes, so I am taking a job at Vanity Fair. Sad to be leaving the ringer behind. Sad especially to be leaving this podcast behind. I remember this episode of Do You Like Prince Movies?

Which I still follow on my podcast app, even though there are no new episodes. Hopefully you guys know what to do without at least this iteration of damage control. Hopefully you know how to digest the internet and make sense of culture and be mad in a healthy and reasonable way. And to not do it in Twitter threads and to just take a lap. You know, maybe rent Ready Player One. Don't give it your $17, et cetera, et cetera. You know, you know, just my general life advice. Live responsibly.

Live responsibly. This has been very nice. This has been very fun. Developing this podcast, being on it. I've had a very good time. Fans of damage control should know that this is just kind of like how Cam and I operate in the real world. So off mic, these conversations continue. So you'll just have to wait for the NSA, the FBI, to leak the inevitable tapes that they have.

Yeah, you'll just have to imagine the fire. Yeah, this has been great. Thanks, Cam. I'm going to miss you.