A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination.

Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild?

1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous.

1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless.

1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you?

1:38 Erin: I have not. And I. Actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish.

1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see a moose?

1:56 Erin: I don't know.

1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild, really?

2:03 Erin: Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to. But maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see a moose. Like, I just, I. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees 1996 World Series sweatshirt.

2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it?

2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a mousse on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm going to see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I bought a moose sweatshirt in I think Grand Teton. And I was like, I'm going to see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah and things would happen and everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw a baby moose and its mom. And I'd get all excited and I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me.

3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white heart or something like that?

3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. But even the garden variety moose. No, no, just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it.

3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy. Right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking or are they both?

3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand.

4:22 Wes: Interesting.

4:23 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic.

4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal.

4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's. That she's grown up in and that she's a part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on.

5:16 Wes: Okay, so maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right.

5:26 Erin: Yeah.

5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading?

5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower, middle, upper five islands, five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the Passengers lie back, snores, some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises. An old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store. And finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, Dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly. Sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel this sweet sensation of joy. Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit McAdam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.

11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. Read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background?

11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about more. But yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hoffman, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a. In a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sistina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified.

12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it.

12:56 Erin: That's right. She started this in, I think, 1946.

13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this

13:04 Erin: was published in Geography 3. So she finished it in the 70s.

13:07 Wes: Okay.

13:08 Erin: Geography 3 came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, geography three is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that.

13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there.

13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem.

14:04 Wes: Yeah.

14:05 Erin: Low rate of productivity is great to.

14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that.

14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live large and die with a slim collected is kind of a.

14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro.

14:28 Erin: That's right.

14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it? This is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony.

14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me.

14:44 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while.

14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely.

14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip, and there really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven relatives. Yeah.

15:12 Erin: Yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage.

15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right.

15:36 Erin: Her.

15:36 Wes: Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized.

15:40 Erin: That's right, yeah.

15:41 Wes: At the age when she was 5.

15:43 Erin: That's right.

15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead.

15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from the bite on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar.

16:22 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general?

16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes a scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefooted on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with them to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema and really, like, I think Almost died of both at one time or other. Very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up.

18:14 Wes: Wow.

18:15 Erin: It's a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography three, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, the sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich.

19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. Are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you Add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, well, begins with the tides, but.

20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and just the necessities. And a place we learn that maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it.

21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward. It's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and. And brought along with it towards her destination.

22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there.

22:31 Wes: Well, I was gonna say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my Finger on it. Exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now, then? What's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image.

23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or of just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant considering that she's talking about a tide.

23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But.

23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too.

23:41 Wes: Right.

23:41 Erin: You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that, too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border.

24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But. Yeah, I had the same thought, too. Yeah. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall of brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there.

24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big suddenly reduced in size to the handheld. But Coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are, in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, sort of springing out of the fishing industry.

25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide.

25:52 Erin: That's great.

25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus.

26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content.

26:56 Wes: Right.

26:56 Erin: Of the road itself. So we get that combination of something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area.

27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading on the show soon. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses. So from the red clay. And you can make homes from them as well. And common in Sierra and Leon. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up and went, all right, there must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah.

27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral. The.

27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay. Type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering.

27:56 Erin: Right.

27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the.

28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming.

28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil.

28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling.

28:40 Wes: It's such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading, well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more vivid, definitely.

29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image.

29:52 Wes: And.

29:52 Erin: Yeah, you talked about momentum too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. And Akali supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak. Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I E Y e of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the

30:48 Wes: capital I We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop?

31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass river. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's.

31:48 Wes: As far as the content. Content goes.

31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging, one of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from. Certainly from a moving bus.

32:43 Wes: Yeah. The point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important, which is the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very beautiful.

33:12 Erin: Yeah, they Compound. And then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boots and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on the red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment of tent. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so probably no real connection there.

34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it means. Or. It means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and evening is approaching in a kind of mini winter. Right. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves as evening commences. It's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see. Okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the. The light reflecting off the enamel bus or. Right. Not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah. The shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime.

35:39 Erin: Right? Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To autumn you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence you get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind.

36:07 Wes: Right.

36:08 Erin: Because there's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is. It's got to be like August. Maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development.

36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter, it's called. It gets colder. And we see the.

36:46 Erin: Definitely.

36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season.

36:52 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. And that point, or that point in the transition from summer to autumn, where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, you know, the evening temperature. Right. Is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get.

37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we? Oh, yes, let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two.

37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait.

37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet.

37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinals rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you.

37:30 Wes: Thank you.

The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”

Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:12 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s

0:25 Wes: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing.

0:29 Erin: That's also a movie.

0:30 Wes: I like the Money Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe.

0:38 Erin: Oh, there it is.

0:39 Wes: Rise of Cobra.

0:41 Erin: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like Andre Bazan and, you know, all sorts of. Vin Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case.

1:35 Wes: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming.

1:40 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

1:41 Wes: Lots of parallels.

1:43 Erin: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser.

2:16 Wes: He's going to be £300 in this one.

2:18 Erin: That'll be great.

2:19 Wes: Rachel. Rachel Weiss has to roll him around. I'm sorry.

2:23 Erin: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me.

2:28 Wes: I just going to be called Beached.

2:35 Erin: So mean.

2:36 Wes: The I love the whale.

2:38 Erin: Yeah.

2:38 Wes: I cried, like, audibly at a theater.

2:44 Erin: He's so great.

2:45 Wes: Yeah, he's great.

2:46 Erin: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic and Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic and Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment.

3:19 Wes: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin.

3:23 Erin: Exactly.

3:24 Wes: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that.

3:30 Erin: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over.

3:47 Wes: Right.

3:48 Erin: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved. And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature. And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation. So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding.

6:13 Wes: Right.

6:13 Erin: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which

6:21 Wes: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the Philosopher curse on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory. So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity.

7:25 Erin: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the hom die and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well.

8:06 Wes: Right.

8:07 Erin: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme.

8:36 Wes: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal?

8:54 Erin: Because you got your girlfriend?

8:55 Wes: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain.

9:03 Erin: Right.

9:03 Wes: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing. You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like. So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed.

10:23 Erin: She doesn't have parents, so.

10:27 Wes: Did I do that?

10:28 Erin: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you. Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience.

11:26 Wes: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor. Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in

12:22 Erin: the field, as you were saying, not too shy.

12:24 Wes: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy.

12:27 Erin: She's sheltered a little.

12:28 Wes: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah.

12:42 Erin: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really.

12:52 Wes: Hear me roar.

12:54 Erin: Yeah.

12:55 Wes: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison forward impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that.

13:19 Erin: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that.

13:21 Wes: Yeah.

13:24 Erin: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book.

13:30 Wes: Oh, yeah.

13:31 Erin: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world.

13:56 Wes: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one.

13:59 Erin: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants.

14:35 Wes: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical?

14:52 Erin: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast.

14:58 Wes: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed.

15:27 Erin: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy.

15:37 Wes: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think.

15:45 Erin: Yeah. She's angry.

15:46 Wes: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other.

15:52 Erin: Yeah.

15:53 Wes: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think.

15:58 Erin: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape.

16:19 Wes: What does he say?

16:19 Erin: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the magi when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three. They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Minna, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan?

17:21 Wes: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan.

17:28 Erin: Yeah.

17:28 Wes: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so.

17:32 Erin: Good. I love Dr. Bombay.

17:33 Wes: Yeah.

17:34 Erin: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy.

17:46 Wes: How do you mean?

17:47 Erin: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang. So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like emotep.

19:05 Wes: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and boobs. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end.

19:18 Erin: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second. The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys. So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his

20:43 Wes: own, just add American flesh.

20:46 Erin: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you.

21:40 Wes: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films?

21:53 Erin: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right?

21:59 Wes: He's a category unto himself.

22:00 Erin: Oh, okay.

22:01 Wes: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on.

22:07 Erin: He's an electrical man.

22:09 Wes: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the.

22:20 Erin: I haven't.

22:22 Wes: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me.

22:44 Erin: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really.

22:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead.

23:14 Erin: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to.

23:24 Wes: Yeah.

23:25 Erin: Trying to feast on the living and

23:27 Wes: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever. And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us.

24:44 Erin: Hmm.

24:44 Wes: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called?

25:13 Erin: World War Z and then the Walking Dead.

25:16 Wes: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me.

25:21 Erin: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past.

26:02 Wes: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right.

26:19 Erin: It's not.

26:19 Wes: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in. It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way.

27:24 Erin: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified.

27:26 Wes: Sorry.

27:27 Erin: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it.

27:30 Wes: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words.

27:40 Erin: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is.

27:45 Wes: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

27:52 Erin: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read.

27:57 Wes: Thank you.

As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”

Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Erin: As a cinematic monster, the Mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the Mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he's not just dead, but wounded. Ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative, conveniently for the colonizer's psyche, the Mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him, not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand, the Mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archaeological and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy's tomb, his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the Mummy's DNA, in Shakespearean terms, part Antony, part Cleopatra, reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Today, we're discussing the 1999 film the Mummy. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I have two questions to start us off today. The first is, is this the silliest thing we've covered on the podcast to date, or was elf sillier?

1:41 Wes: That's a good question. It depends on what you mean by silly. Elf is sillier, but this is the most frivolous choice we've made.

1:54 Erin: I'm trying to figure out if you're mad at me for selecting this or if our listeners are going to be mad at me.

2:00 Wes: I hadn't seen it, except it might have been on in the background when I met my father when I was around 22, and he had hundreds and hundreds of the HS tapes of various movies that he had pirated. And there was always a movie on in the background when I was hanging out with my siblings. And I vaguely remember scenes from this because they were on in the background, but I had never actually seen the movie, and it didn't. I like mummy film. Horror films in general don't appeal to me, but mummy films especially, for some reason.

2:28 Erin: Oh, no.

2:30 Wes: So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing I would end up watching on my own, but it's an interesting. I could see, you know, I started. I saw immediately why it would be up your alley. Because of, like, screwball ish comedy. Right. It operates in two dimensions, so that was interesting.

2:45 Erin: This came out when I was 8 years old. We had this local video store that I used to go to to rent movies. When you walked in the door, there was a huge cardboard. I guess the technical term for it is a standee. You know, those big cardboard displays that they'll have in movie theaters or wherever to publicize a film? There was a huge display of the Mummy with different characters and right when you came in. So to me, it's sort of the ultimate summer blockbuster film because that was the thing you saw whenever you came in. And more often than not, you know, I was suggestible enough to think, oh, I could go for watching the Mummy again. Super fun to watch at a sleepover or on a summer night. So I love this film. I mean, I'm gonna try to expand our conversation to talk about the mummy in general, which I do think is kind of an interesting concept. And maybe we could talk about why you find mummies particularly uninteresting. But that leads me to my second question.

3:41 Wes: You can analyze me a little bit.

3:43 Erin: Leads me to my second question, which is, are mummies scary? And maybe this is why you don't like them. Because I think I have an answer to this, and I think yours is going to be the same. I don't know.

3:53 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. I was thinking about this film in relation to other horror films, including Alien, because we did that one. And. And I think it's a great film. And also the Exorcist, which I think is a great film. I was thinking, well, I'm not entirely opposed to horror. I'm not into horror films, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. And those two films have, like, a solid thematic essence to them involving relationships like, you know, Reagan on the verge of puberty and an absent father and then an alien. The relationships between the ship members kind of alienated. And then this lack of a paternal authority. Just. Just like there is in the Exorcist and the ship computer called Mother. There's always a mother thing going on. It's hard not to think of that with the Mummy as well. But. So I was thinking. I'm not into jump scare films. I don't get. Although, you know, I guess I went to see it. Is that what it's called? The Clown?

4:52 Erin: Yeah.

4:53 Wes: Terrifying movie. And I actually did enjoy the. You know, because the audience would jump and then we'd all laugh at being kind of taken in. So. So maybe I do. You know, this is not. It's not very. A very fruitful analysis. We're conducting here. I'm too conflicted. But. But mummies in particular. Let's get to the point. Are mummies in particular scary? I don't think so. Horror movies used to scare me as a kid, big time. The Exorcist scared the crap out of me because even though I wasn't religious at that point, part of me believed in the devil just, just in sanctuary and I couldn't deal with it. And then other horror films, it like got into my bones in a way they just can't do as an adult. So in general, I don't think I can be scared in the deeper way that I used to be scared when I was a kid. And then this, you know, because this is also romantic comedy, I find it hard to be. To find any of it scary. Exactly. So, yeah, say more what you mean about scary and whether mummies are scary.

5:48 Erin: I just don't think they're scary. And that's one of the reasons why I like this movie. Right. Is because it's not scary. I mean, I don't like horror movies either. Right. But I like that. I like the Mummy as a concept. It's interesting to think of it in the Universal monster movie context and the Mummy as a monster. You could approach that from a lot of different angles. It's, you know, it's a dead body come to life. I mean, I think there's elements of the zombie in the Mummy. There's elements of the vampire and the Mummy in certain ways much, much closer to the vampire. But maybe we could tweeze that out a bit. I think the Mummy as a monster figure is scary, if you really think about it, which is a way of saying that it's not scary. So that's why you need, you know, the accompanying curse. Though maybe you can't really separate the Mummy from the curse, but you know, the Mummy that can unhinge its jaws and become sand and at some point the emoteps little mummy army is climbing on the walls. That becomes a bigger part of the Mummy Returns, which is a truly bad film. I love it, but it's a truly bad film. So I didn't make us do that. Peeling the flesh off of people's bones and then also you have to throw in the scarabs. So you basically need this entire cast of supporting scary things, I think, in order to make the Mummy work as a horror film. I don't quite think of this as a horror film. I mean, part of it is also just the way that the CGI has aged Technically, of course, it has horror tropes, but it's just not that scary to me. Maybe what's kind of scary about it, in a thinky way, is related to the main reading of mummies that I'm interested in exploring, which are. Which is something like the mummy as a colonial fantasy. The colonizer goes into a place that doesn't belong to them, and then they start literally and metaphorically exhuming the culture that they've entered, either to leech off of it or destroy it. And then there's this curse idea. So they awaken this curse, which it seems anti colonial, like it's payback for disturbing the mummy. But in fact, it really kind of serves the colonizer in a way, because the mummy actually wants to come back to life. It actually wants you to disturb it. It wants you to fall into the trap of the curse. So the colonizer is kind of, in that sense, exonerated from the act of meddling in the first place and from colonizing in the first place by the psychology of this curse or the psychology of the mummy wanting to return to life. And then the colonizer has to also kill the mummy and restore order. So they cause the problem, sort of, but it's really more the mummy's fault or the mummy was asking for it. And so they caused the problem, then they themselves are the solution. And I guess that's a scary dynamic in itself for what it reveals about the colonial or the imperial psyche. But I also think that this dynamic can be extended in all sorts of directions. So it might reflect something in each of us about our own relationships to the past. Something silly like maybe we're all colonizers and we all have mummies inside of us that want to come back to life, and our job is to kill that part of ourselves and that desire to reenact the past or something like that. And maybe that. Maybe there's something scary about that, that element, whatever you want to call it, from something as. Maybe as simplistic as the return of the repressed to something like giving up on previous versions of ourselves or whatever the case may be. I mean, in this, in the mummy movies, it's a lost love that has to be ultimately abandoned or. Yeah, I don't know that that's scary, but that's the best I could do.

9:28 Wes: Well, I think once you start relating it to relationships, whether it's between colonizer and colonized or whether it's a love relationship, then it becomes scary.

9:36 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

9:37 Wes: Relationships are scary. But I think the key word There is preservation because the mummy, obviously, is a preserved. And I guess for the ancient Egyptians, it had something to do with preservation into the afterlife. Right. Why did they do it? Do you have firmer knowledge than me about this? Our research team was on vacation this

10:02 Erin: week, if I remember correctly. And see, this is. The other thing is, of course, I'm sure you had. Didn't we talk about this? You had an Egyptology phase, didn't you, as a kid?

10:11 Wes: Yeah, my grandmother was very into it and there were lots of books around, so I was very fascinated by it. And even today, one of the first thing I do when I go into a museum is go to the Egypt section. And the sense of being in contact with things that are that old and ancient, just crossing that gap is just very powerful for me. And you can look at the signs and it's, you know, this is 2500 BC, and yet these artifacts are so well preserved. And so you can think of. Try to place yourself back then. But the pictogram writing is so weird and alien. It almost is like aliens. And even I think some of the alien aesthetic. Right. Is in films from actual aliens is borrowed from ancient Egypt. So there's something about. Yeah. That combination of preservation and of artifacts and alienness that. That is really powerful.

11:07 Erin: Yeah. When I was a kid, I took a. I don't know if I ever told you this. I took a correspondence course on hieroglyphics from the Oriental Institute.

11:14 Wes: Oh, wow.

11:15 Erin: But, yeah, I was really into it, so another reason why I loved this movie.

11:19 Wes: Are you still. Are you fluent in hieroglyphics?

11:21 Erin: No, I can. I can recognize some things.

11:25 Wes: But apparently they did. They did speak actual, you know, reconstructed ancient Egyptian in the film. Yes, that's what I saw. Yeah.

11:33 Erin: You know, just one of the many great things about this masterpiece.

11:38 Wes: That kind of attention to detail.

11:40 Erin: Exactly.

11:41 Wes: You know, really lends itself to verisimilitude of.

11:46 Erin: The thing that always bothers me is

11:47 Wes: they say waking up and running around. Yeah.

11:49 Erin: The. The five canopic jars. And he's like, there are only four. That's such a basic thing to get wrong. But anyway, if I remember correctly, and I did not look this up beforehand, I'm sorry, but I believe that the Egyptians thought that you had three souls and that the preservation of the body involved needing a place for all of these souls to meet for you to become reincarnated.

12:12 Wes: Oh, right.

12:13 Erin: So that's funny.

12:14 Wes: We actually did a little bit of ancient Egyptian philosophy on the show. I'm part of the partially examined Life recently.

12:21 Erin: Was there anything interesting there?

12:24 Wes: Some stuff about. Yeah, there's these different souls. So we read something called the Instructor and one of the things we read was a dialogue between a man and his soul. One of the souls, the soul that was supposed to carry it off to the afterlife, I think. But it's just stuff taken from fragments of papyrus, basically. And I was surprised that so much writing survived.

12:49 Erin: I have some book on the Book of the Dead somewhere packed away in my. I have a lot of my library packed away right now. But, you know, a lot of the stuff like you can. You can read what's in there. And it's a lot of spells and a lot of protection type. It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. And of course, this is one of the controversies about, I think about the curse of the Pharaohs is that a lot of the supposed warnings about disturbing the body or else the curse will come for you were actually invented by newspapers in the 20s as a result of the fervor around King Tut's tomb. And the idea back then. Right. You know, I didn't. I didn't get the chance to actually research this further, but I was also reading that mummies were ground up and they were kept in people's like, medicine cabinets and they were actually. Yeah. And they were actually used. So. No. Another reason why I inherently love mummies. They're actually used as a coagulant. So Which I find so interesting. I don't know what the psychology of that is about or what that's about, except that they think that mummies are dried up bodies. So it'll dry up your cut or. I have no idea. But gross. It's also, you know, further like vampire connection, I guess, sort of.

14:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a good point. And now that, you know there's a preservation element in vampires too, right. Also to the point of eternal life. I mean, with preservation, I think we're gonna. We'll talk a bit about the love element, right? To this idea of everlasting love. I think that this movie brings in with it Imhotep in Ankhsunamon. How do you pronounce it?

14:27 Erin: Anax and Amun.

14:28 Wes: Anaksunamun. Anaksunamun.

14:31 Erin: Or Marta, you can call her either one.

14:34 Wes: Oh, yeah. I know. It took me a while to figure that out.

14:37 Erin: But it's always an arrested development connection for us in every episode.

14:41 Wes: The thing that the Egyptians did with mummies is weird and gross. Right. We all know that.

14:46 Erin: Sort of. I mean, it's also kind of just Kidding.

14:48 Wes: Yeah.

14:49 Erin: Okay.

14:50 Wes: But it lends itself to the idea, okay, what are they being preserved for? Yeah, okay. The afterlife. Sure. But maybe they were being preserved for us in our museums. But also, I think, like the wrapping up in bandages, like a burn victim type thing, you know, it lends itself to the idea that, okay, well, maybe they could come back to life. And it connects to certain, I guess, folktales about the dangers of preservation. Right. Or fairy tales. I wish I could live forever, but then I live as a rotting corpse.

15:22 Erin: Or like, death becomes her. Have you seen that?

15:25 Wes: No, I haven't, actually. I know.

15:28 Erin: It's related to this idea. You live forever, but then you become disgusting and you have all these problems. Yeah, right.

15:34 Wes: It's like. It's like the. You know, the fairy tales where you have a wish and it's, be careful what you wish for. Because there's always a downside. Right. The wish is misinterpreted in some way or comes with a downside you didn't expect or something like that. But anyway, so, yeah, so there's the wish for eternal life, and then there's also the wish for eternal love, which I think this movie plays on.

15:55 Erin: It's interesting how the movie coalesces a lot of different things that are. I mean, it's almost a compendium of different symbols that the Mummy represents. So a really old idea about the Mummy is that they're a figure of pathos and a romantic figure, and they're actually a bunch of Victorian stories about people having romances with mummies or the Mummy being a figure of unrequited love. And I take this to be a really suggestive part of the Mummy's appearance, that the bandages suggest that he's somehow wounded or that he comes out of a wounded or incomplete or somehow interrupted past, or a narrative that he wasn't able to. To carry out and sort of wrenched out of that narrative. Right. So the wrapping seemed to suggest that interrupted life or that unrequited love. That was kind of where people's minds first went with the Mummy, this idea of the romantic lover separated from the beloved by death. And in the 1932 Mummy, that film also has the unrequited love thing with the Anck Su Namun figure and then Boris Karloff. I was really surprised by this when I went back and rewatched it. It's a really boring film. The beginning has a lot of interesting ideas about colonization, that the film then drops. But Karloff just kind of walks around, you know, trying to pretend to Be some normal guy even though he has really bad social skills. And he kind of hypnotizes the female figure in the film, the one who sort of lines up with Evelyn. He's almost like a Mesmer figure or very similar to the vampire where he hypnotizes her and draws her to him. And she is somehow. It's not really explained very well in the film, but she's somehow the reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, much like evelyn in the 1999 film. Something is made of the fact that she might be some sort of distant ancestor because she's also half Egyptian and half English like the Evelyn character.

17:54 Wes: So I think if some of that had been preserved, it could have made for a more powerful emotional content to the film. Right. Because in this case the threat is all just external to Evelyn. It's not like she is being possessed or seduced or something.

18:11 Erin: No. Well, he does kiss her at certain points and he does confuse her with an AK Sudemon. So I think they're trying to make that connection.

18:17 Wes: She kisses him too, I think.

18:19 Erin: Oh yes. To distract him.

18:20 Wes: The only completed kiss is she kisses him.

18:24 Erin: That's right. I don't want to know what a completed kiss is. Anyway.

18:30 Wes: He does get his tongue though back by then, I think. Sorry.

18:34 Erin: No, but she's supposed to be the human sacrifice for anoxynamon. Because one of the things that I guess I figured out about the the economy of this film is that Imhotep needs several men to become fully reincarnated. But I guess anoxynamon only needs one. It's just a one to one ratio for. For a woman. I really wonder about a lot of things in this movie and the logic. Like stealing the blind guys eyes and then the fact that the mummy doesn't need glasses.

19:01 Wes: But anyway, how about all you have to do is carry around the cat and you'd be good.

19:07 Erin: Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah.

19:09 Wes: And they don't. I mean the first thing I do if I found that out is round up a bunch of cats, go to the shelter.

19:17 Erin: Exactly.

19:19 Wes: So that bothered me a bit. There's some few plot or in the beginning when like does she have to kill her? I guess she's trapped. So she does have to kill herself. Like that's the. That's the logical plan for him to resurrect her. Why couldn't they just escape together?

19:36 Erin: She so believed that he. See, this is like a perfect example of oh what, what do they say now? The opposite of he's just not that into you. Like, if you. If you. Oh, if he. If he wanted to, he would. That's the. The. The current dating advice. Right. So she was so assured of his love for her that she knew that all she had to do was kill her would find a way.

19:57 Wes: Oh, she's playing hard to get. Okay.

19:59 Erin: No, no, no. She's not playing hard to get. She's expressing full trust in his ability to overcome death, to rescue her. He's devoted.

20:09 Wes: You know, it's a love that's supposed to transcend everything. And as we know, that kind of love, there's a danger to it. Right. It can kind of blot out the world. And in this case, it could literally blot out the world once it's resurrected. So I think that's one of the ideas here, whether it's well thought out, is that this level of intensity in love can be destructive. And that's offset, of course, by the relationship, Rick and Evelyn, where they have a healthy level of antagonism. This is going back to Much Ado or screwball comedies. Right? The healthy level of antagonism that prevents you from trying to mummify and resurrect and get into all that creepy stuff. You know, keep it. Keep some boundaries. A little antagonism.

21:05 Erin: Well, they're together against the forces of death. Yeah. So in a way, they have a. They have a joint project of trying to. Trying to resurrect each other.

21:15 Wes: I'd like to see what happens if they. If Imhotep had succeeded and then 20 years into their relationship. I'd like to, like, a window in on that. He's sitting on the couch watching tv, and she's yelling at him about something. No, she's like, bandages on the floor.

21:34 Erin: Yeah, it's really good. No, no. She's like, I'm going out. And he's like, where. Where are you going? Just. God, I'm just getting drinks with my friends.

21:42 Wes: Leave me alone.

21:43 Erin: I'm allowed to spend some time away from you.

21:47 Wes: There you go. Ultimately, she ends up getting a restraining order on him. I resurrected you. You belong to me.

22:00 Erin: She gets half the contents of the tomb.

22:04 Wes: Yeah, there you go. So, you know. Yeah, it's all good until you succeed. Until then, it's tragic and eternal.

22:13 Erin: I like this idea that you're maybe the claustrophobia of this kind of relationship or this idea of preservation because it' related directly to the mummification ritual. You know, the loading up the tomb and trying to create the perfect conditions whereby you can survive. And somehow the effort expended on this is fruitless. One of the ideas behind whether or not there was actually a curse of the pharaohs specifically involved in King Tut's tomb. Whether or not people who entered the tomb were more susceptible to illness had to do with the fact that they would put food in the tomb, assuming that you would have to eat once you were reincarnated or after death or whatever. And so that food eventually, of course, went very, very, very bad. And there was bacteria found in the tomb that could cause a bunch of. A bunch of problems, including pneumonia and some of the people who entered the tomb. Yeah. But I think the idea is that there was this bacteria in the tomb, but that it wasn't enough to infect you or that it couldn't have survived for that long. You know, they found, like, the dead bacteria, something like that. But anyway, it was decomposing over thousands of years, releasing all of these acids and chemicals, and also the bugs that were eating these, you know, all of the. The fish and the. All those things that were in there, then those bugs themselves decomposing and creating really gross things inside this little lockbox. So, yeah, there's something, I don't know, maybe accidentally, metaphorically putrid. Right. About. About that whole concept of trying to preserve something unnaturally beyond its, you know, say it's sell by date.

23:56 Wes: Yeah. Like in Frankenstein, which we'll do eventually with. Right. He's reassembling, taking pieces of corpses and putting them together. And you almost say. Reminds me of high school when we did dissection, which I hated with a passion, in part because of the formaldehyde smell you get all over you. That you couldn't just do anything about this, you know, beyond the grossness of doing the dissections themselves. But it's, you know, I imagine, like the body of Frankenstein is sort of like a. Yeah. It's preserved, but it's not preserved in life. Right. It's preserved in death somehow. It doesn't decay. And you can do things with it, and maybe if it's your body, you can do things with it, but there's something dead about it at the same time. So the intention of seeing someone off into the afterlife, and I suppose it must have been largely symbolic, or maybe there was a. You know, did they literally believe they needed to eat? Or maybe it was a big controversy. Did they really eat the food or did they just symbolically eat. Right. The transubstantiation.

24:57 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they really believed that. Yep.

25:01 Wes: And there were factions and wars and. No. So anyway, yeah, the attempt at preservation, I think that, you know, your point is well taken. Can preserve something at the cost of its putridness. And then going to your colonialism idea. 19th century Egypt is a very different place than ancient Egypt. It's already been colonized, right, by a completely different culture. So the relationship is between the modern Egyptians of the time and that ancient culture, which is alien and also exploiters and, you know, like Napoleon and colonizers and conquerors who have that relationship not just to the local culture, but also to this ancient culture, which I think serves as a object of at least two impulses. One of them is just for the treasure and the other is this curiosity. And maybe there's a morbid curiosity there. What is it about our curiosity when we go into a museum? What's so fascinating about all of this stuff to us? And is there something a bit pernicious about it? Right, so there's something about the incredible preservation of a culture that's so ancient that is exciting and fascinating. But then we have to think about our relationship to that and what that's about, I suppose. Is it entirely well intentioned?

26:24 Erin: It seems to me. On the one hand, part of the intention is to feel a lack of difference or to feel some connection with this ancient time, with this culture that's really different from one's own. One wants to feel a connection to this. And that's a big part of the motivation for, say, going to the museum. But then also you want that difference preserved as well. You want to feel that this is thrilling and exotic and different from you. So you want to relate to it on the one hand and also don't want to on the other, or you don't want it to relate to you. You know, that push pull is also in the figure of the mummy. I don't know if I'm characterizing that in a way you would agree with.

27:06 Wes: We're looking into the past in a way. I think we're looking at our own origins. The origins are supposed to explain something about us, right? In a way they've given. They are not just our predecessors, but our progenitors. Right. Our ancient culture, you know, you remember in history class, it's kind of taught as if these ancient cultures were sort of the right. They're giving birth to everything that follows. We are who we are as civilized, supposedly people. Our civilization is built on top of those civilizations. So we look at those origins. It's almost like the fascination with parentage in a certain way. But also we can't overcome the alien ness of those origins. It's not unlike a relationship to deities and religion, where it's something about focusing on an origin. But also the concept of the alien is. Is ever a problem, or at least according to certain philosophers. Right. Hegel thought he was kind of solving that problem. Like faith in the Kantian sense leaves God too much of an alien presence because he's unknowable. And Hegel wants to say he's. Well, actually, he is noble. So in this case, it's the unknowableness of the. Of Egyptian culture. Culture because it does remain really weird and alien. It's like it's hard to get your mind. It's hard to. Just hard to imagine what it would be like to be a person back then in that kind of society. Maybe this feeling is superficial. Maybe, you know, maybe we shouldn't look at hieroglyphs and various other artifacts and the strangeness of mummification and think that it's all that different. Right. These are people who are just people and have the same everyday concerns as we do. But I think part of it has something to do with this idea of feeling like we're trying to come to terms with a kind of origin that is nevertheless alien to us. It's no coincidence that people want to say the pyramids were created by aliens and that in a way, it's another sort of creation myth. They want to. Alien style. Where did human beings come from? Well, from aliens. You know, never mind the theological questions that arise from that. Where did the aliens come from? Why don't we just go straight to the source? We really need the middleman.

29:23 Erin: But anyway, yeah, what you were saying, even before you connected it, I was thinking, oh, yeah, this sounds. You're exactly right. This sounds just like aliens. And that, I think, is something that we also covered in our podcast on Alien. The idea that this is maybe part of what the film was exploring was obviously was sex itself or something about the sex organs themselves. And therefore also this idea of parentage and who our progenitors are, and the Egyptians are sort of filling that same role. The aliens that placed us here in some way. Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I had thought about, you know, Mummy versus Zombie, Mummy versus Vampire, but I really think Mummy and Alien are really the closest relatives. And I should have thought of that because I was also thinking about this film in relationship to Picnic and Hanging Rock, or maybe even a mirror image of Picnic and Hanging Rock and the kind of lessons of colonization that that film has. Maybe we could start with that in part two and Then maybe transition to looking at the film a little bit more closely. Though I still have a lot to. I feel like, to say about just the figure of the mummy itself, but we'll. We'll try to dive into it a little more.

30:29 Wes: Yeah. And get into the romantic comedy aspect too.

30:32 Erin: Sure. Thank you.

30:34 Wes: Thank you.

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.

Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Waiting for Godot. Erin, you wanted to say something about the typical characterization of them as tramps.

0:24 Erin: Yeah. Do you think they're as characters gaining a little bit from the association with, you know, as I've already talked about Laurel and Hardy, but also maybe Chaplin.

0:34 Wes: Yeah, I think that's meant to be an association. Yeah. Beckett actually talked about them. Right. As tramps, even though it's not referenced in the play itself. But he was involved in the production where he. I think. I think he gave some guidance on this, on their appearance and what they were supposed to be. But.

0:53 Erin: Yeah, I see. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to just argue that the comedy read is really the best way I've found to understand this is the trajectory of the Tramp. Often is this sort of dilation of time and funny business. I mean, you have in the figure of the Tramp the idea of someone who is always going, always moving and yet going nowhere. The ending, such as it is, you know, the famous idea that Godot never comes or that nothing, nothing amounts to anything in the end, is actually predicted in the Tramp trope, in which Tramp trope.

1:35 Wes: I was going to get a tramp stamp, but I decided on getting a tramp stamp.

1:38 Erin: I decided on the Tramp trope. But at the end of these little escapades, you know, these little serial adventures in the life of the Tramp, what happens? Nothing. Right. He might have a delusion of grandeur. Something might happen to him. You know, there'll be a little bit of a plot for the 20 minute silent film or whatever that he's engaged in. And then usually at the end, disappointment, back on the road, back where he began. No salvation, no social climb, no actual progress, but just movement. So movement without progress is kind of the life of the Tramp.

2:16 Wes: So at this point, right, they've just talked about, had an absurd conversation about whether to commit suicide and who should go first, you know, depending on so that the branch doesn't break for the second one and then leave them alone. And Estragon says, don't let's do anything. It's safer. And then Vladimir says, let's wait and see what he says. As if Godot is going to tell them whether they should commit suicide, or in what order they should commit suicide. Or maybe whether that there's some reason not to commit suicide. Estragon. Says who? Giddo. Estragon. Good idea. Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand, says Vladimir. Do you want to go back and forth for a second here?

3:00 Erin: Sure. On the other hand, it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.

3:05 Wes: I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it.

3:09 Erin: What exactly did we ask him for?

3:11 Wes: Were you not there?

3:12 Erin: I can't have been listening.

3:14 Wes: Oh, nothing very definite.

3:16 Erin: A kind of prayer.

3:19 Wes: Precisely.

3:20 Erin: A vague supplication.

3:23 Wes: Exactly.

3:25 Erin: This is funny. And what did he reply? That he'd see that he couldn't promise anything.

3:32 Wes: That he'd have to think it over

3:34 Erin: in the quiet of his home, consult

3:36 Wes: his family, his friends, his agents, his

3:41 Erin: correspondence, his books, his bank account, before taking a decision. It's the normal thing, is it not? I think it is.

3:52 Wes: I think so too. All right, so that's fun.

3:58 Erin: These are really, really fun to read out loud.

4:01 Wes: Yeah. So strike. Yeah. So you can see all the comedy in here. Strike the iron before freezes instead of while it's hot.

4:11 Erin: The anticipation of the end.

4:15 Wes: Yeah. What did we ask him for? Nothing very definite. A kind of prayer. Precisely.

4:22 Erin: Right.

4:22 Wes: So it's not definite, but it's precise. It's vague, but exactly.

4:28 Erin: Will he come tomorrow, Surely.

4:31 Wes: Yeah. That he couldn't promise anything. But anyway, so we. We get the idea that they don't know what exactly they're waiting on. What's. It's. It's very vague. And they. They even use the word vague. And the word prayer is used. And other times the word save is used. And savior. So there's some religious association here as well.

4:51 Erin: What's funny too, is in the middle of all this, it strikes me, on page 11, Vladimir says, your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives. And prior to this, I think on the very first page.

5:02 Wes: Yeah. Where did your worship sleep tonight? Or something like that.

5:05 Erin: Right, your highness? Yeah. And because of what happens with the stickiness of language with Vladimir, he starts calling even before they decide to play at Pato and Lucky on day two, or in the second act, he has already started calling estragon pig, a use of the term that Pozzo uses for lucky. So one wonders if, you know, the day before this they were. Vladimir was contaged by someone who was calling someone else your highness and your worship in a. In a sort of sarcastic way or something like that.

5:41 Wes: Interesting. Yeah.

5:42 Erin: We intuit in Act 2 that he picks up on some turns of phrase from Pazzo, but. Yeah, but it's funny that it comes up in the midst of this theological conversation which doesn't occur in Act 2. So those words, I think, aren't used at all in Act 2. But maybe from the beginning, Vladimir has come into this conversation already ruminating on this idea of the thieves being saved. And that's what suggests the sarcastic your worship phrase to his mind, rather than some other characters that we haven't seen in act minus one.

6:16 Wes: It seems to me to sort of reverse their roles a bit, because Vladimir is actually the one more in charge. And he has a name which is more. There's more half to it. Right. There's actually been princes, Russian princes named Vladimir and Estragon. Again, it's a name of an herb. Yeah. You get a sense Vladimir is more in charge. So it's a weird inversion to. Suggests that Estragon is in charge. But of course, you know, there is a sense in which the person who doesn't seem to be in charge is in charge. And in fact. Right. The diminutives that they have for each other. Gogo and Dee Dee. Right. Estragon, Gogo. And of course he wants to go all the time, but he can't, because they're waiting for gado, which is almost like a combination of their names. Go and D. Go DD sounds like D almost sounds like this. It's like this, this, or here. Here versus Go. Go. Stasis versus motion and what Freud would call secondary process, and the kind of fixing something in one's attention and rational thought and planning, which certainly Vladimir has, versus just impulse, which is what Estragon seems to have. So to sort of say your highness or your worship is to raise the question of who's in charge. Is it executive function that's in charge, or is it impulse and instinct that's in charge?

7:42 Erin: To give maybe credence to your idea that Estragon is maybe secretly the one in control or in charge. Pozzo's name is confused with Godot. And Gogo certainly sounds more like Godot than Didi does. Though I like your idea that the name kind of combines the two in a way so that we could say that, you know, Pazo is the more obviously dominant one of that pair. Godot, say in the pair that he's A part of. With the boy is certainly the dominant. And then Gogo, Estragon would be along that axis. Though, of course, these dynamics shift in Act 2. I mean. Yeah. From the beginning, Vladimir is saving Estragon, or trying to save Estragon from these people that apparently beat him up all night.

8:25 Wes: Right.

8:26 Erin: Which is, like, really sad, but also

8:28 Wes: really funny because he transgresses in some way. Vladimir suggests he's doing something to.

8:33 Erin: To antagonize them.

8:34 Wes: Yeah. So the idea that there's something impulsive about Estragon that gets a natural response. So what happens when Pazzo and Lucky arrive? Well, it's kind of a relief. Okay. You know, it's like, okay, something interesting is going to happen in this play. And it's kind of a traveling vaudeville act. It's more pronounced than the vaudeville act that we've already been witnessing and more extreme. And in a way, Pazzo and Lucky seem to be exaggerated versions of Vladimir and Estragon. So, Right. There's a kind of a bit of a master slave dynamic, maybe with Vladimir and Estragon, but it's very pronounced with Pazo and Lucky. Lucky is literally his slave. And you can think of Pazzo as a harsh superego or as a. If you're thinking about it intrapsychically or on a social level as, you know, feudal lord or master. There's been lots of readings of this in terms of Hegel's master slave dialectic and all that stuff. So it's really quite. Quite a striking scene when they show up, right, with. So, you know, enter, Pazzo and Lucky. Pazzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed around his neck so that Lucky is the first to enter, followed by the rope, which is long enough to let him reach the middle of the stage before Pazzo appears. Lucky carries a heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket, and a greatcoat. Pozzo, a whip. And then, of course, the way he treats Lucky is quite, you know, quite extreme. Calling him pig and all that and having him give him the whip that he's gonna use to whip him. But from reading, I understand that the very first performance of this, people walked out. And I wonder where it is that they walked out, where it is that this became too objectional. Well, and I suppose maybe it's with Pozzo and Lucky, but you would think that would be the thing. Like, okay, actually, this is getting really interesting now, but I don't know.

10:31 Erin: Well, they've been predicted. I mean, very often, Estragon is the one who's introducing New elements to the dialogue, surprising twists in the dialogue. And one of them that he introduces, the question we're not tied, which he then raises again right before Pozzo and Lucky. Come on. Estragon also has the idea of the necessity for testing the branch to determine their weight before they kill themselves on it, because he doesn't want the branch to not be able to hold whichever of them is heavier and have the heavier person go second so that they don't successfully kill themselves. Something which it takes Vladimir a second to catch up on. Which is a surprising moment because Estragon makes sense and thinks logically about something before Vladimir can intuit it. But both of those instances are about being tied to each other or to Gadot in terms of their fates and then being sort of weighed in the balance, maybe like scales connected, like the two thieves, maybe on the. On the. The crosses on either side of Christ. And then we get Lucky and Pazo coming on to tied together by this rope. Yeah, I like this idea that they're an exaggeration of Estragon and Vladimir. And there are some of the same elements that recur in the pazzo Lucky dynamic, though twisted. So we get the turnip that Vladimir gives Estragon and then Pozzo with the chicken bone. I don't know. I guess maybe it doesn't really work. Erin, it's a carrot. Sorry.

12:07 Wes: Right. Accidentally gives him a Tyranid, but he doesn't. Estragon doesn'. I bring that up because Vladimir really does care about Estragon and is feeding him.

12:17 Erin: Yes.

12:19 Wes: Whereas Pozzo's abusing Lucky and Lucky gets the bones. Right. So the.

12:25 Erin: Right.

12:25 Wes: Right. Pozzo takes out the chicken and eats it himself instead of, you know, whereas Vladimir was offering Estragon food. And then Estragon gets the bones that usually Lucky gets. Usually gets the scraps, gets the leftovers.

12:39 Erin: Right.

12:39 Wes: Pazo is much more imperious and pompous and condescending than Vladimir, and he's a rich man and they're on his land, except the road is free to all, which is a disgrace and blah, blah, blah. So I think that Vladimir thinks he's Godot at first, Right?

12:56 Erin: Yes. Well, they're not sure, or they hear the sound first and they think that sound is potentially Godot coming. Right?

13:03 Wes: Yeah. Vladimir Godot. Estragon says yes. And then Pozzo presents himself as Pozzo and Estragon says he said Godot. So I guess Vladimir realizes quickly that he's not Godot.

13:17 Erin: That's right. And it's in the second act. That I think they say that they're saved. And when they first hear Pazzo and Lucky coming, I think actually the two of them cower at the sound. Yeah. So you're right. He actually does think he might be Godot.

13:31 Wes: So Pozzo accuses him of Pazzo, says, you took me for Godot. And Vladimir says, no. Oh, no, sir. Not for an instant, sir. So, Lyon, who is he? Oh, he's kind of an acquaintance. Estragon? Nothing of the kind. We hardly know him is Vladimir. True, we don't know him very well. But at the same time, Estragon, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. Pazzo, you took me for him. So. Yeah. What's this insistence on the idea that they took him for Godot? You know, it may have something to do with what I was talking about early in the first part, which is just this. Godot could be representative of dramatic resolution or suspense or a plot point. It could be representative of some aspect within a play. So it's almost like saying to the audience, you took me for some item of significance in the play or some plot development. Well, when this play doesn't actually have a plot, or you might say, on my reading, having to do with the foolishness of being so invested in the future, or perhaps even invested in one's ambitions, which are very future oriented. You took me, the rich man, as the thing that you wanted to be or the thing that you're waiting for, expecting. But of course, Estragon and Vladimir, too, I don't think they're not organized enough to give content to Godot in that way. If they're mistaking Pazo for Godot, it's simply right. It's more a function of this idea that they really. Godot doesn't have any content for them, except that he might save them from something which doesn't have a lot of content either.

15:10 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's sort of suggested by the. To take something for something else. There's a sort of interchangeability or like a displacement, I suppose. But then also there's inherent in that maybe, you know, the colloquialism. What do you take me for? Yeah, I love Vladimir saying, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him.

15:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

15:32 Erin: Pazo seems incredulous at the thought that he could be taken for someone else because of his singularity or something. You know, he says disparagingly, of the same species as Pazo, made in God's image. Yeah. The idea that other people would be the same Species as him seems like something distasteful. And so he repeatedly refers to Lucky as a pig and a hog, but says he cannot go for long without the society of my likes. Even when the likeness is an imperfect one.

16:02 Wes: He's gonna deign to, right, to hang out with these guys and, you know, have this feast in front of them, chicken and wine, without offering it to them. So at least they're, you know, they're lesser than him. He's a rich man who owns all the land. But they're. No, they're not. Lucky levels the road is free to all. Yeah. Which he then says is a disgrace. Right. So again, if we were to read this intrapsychically, we might think of it in terms of this relationship between some grandiose aspect of ourselves and then something that's been disavowed. Lucky is the disavowed shadow self that we want to cast off. Or maybe it's the part of us that's being beaten up and abused for being less than. But I think the dynamic of that is to put Pozzo in a position. Why isn't he in his manor, right, with the Stein. He mentions the Steinway. That's where he left his watch. Why isn't he in the manor with the piano entertaining him? Well, he's off to sell Lucky at the fair, right? But he could have someone do that for him. But anyway, he gets put into the position of being a wanderer through a desolate wasteland, which is not quite what we would expect a nobleman to be doing. You get the sense that he's right. He says it himself. What he's really looking for is company. But it's hard to have company if you are that pompous and high up and unaware of the well being of others. Right. Have company in the truest sense.

17:39 Erin: The other element or the other dynamic in his relationship with Lucky is one of the parasitism, I suppose, or as if the rope is an umbilical cord that has allowed Pozzo to leech off of Lucky. Right. Is that the implication that Lucky has previously been able to think and speak and that Pozo has learned things from him or acquired things from him until Lucky becomes hollowed out and unable to make any sort of coherent statement.

18:12 Wes: Yeah, it's quite Lucky, actually. He starts weeping because of what. What Pazzo says here, right. Which is that he's learned so much from. From Lucky. They're inquiring why he doesn't put his baggage down, right. And Pazzo ends up saying he wants to Impress him and mollify him. And then Vladimir is surprised by the idea that Pazzo would want to get rid of them. You know he's going to bring him to the fair. Then there's the whole scene where Estragon gets kicked and Pazzo gives that great speech about the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else, another stops, right? Bucky's tears go to go to Estragon.

18:50 Erin: Underneath, Pazzo says, guess who taught me all these beautiful things? My Lucky. But for him, all my thoughts, all my feelings would have been of common things. Professional worries, beauty, grace, truth of the first water. I knew they were all beyond me. So I took a nook and Vladimir says, a nook? And I looked that up. I couldn't find anything about it, except for stuff about Waiting for Godot and where the origin of that word might be from.

19:16 Wes: Maybe it's like a niche profession.

19:19 Erin: But yeah, that was nearly 60 years ago. Yes, nearly 60. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you? Compared to him, I look like a young man. No? So, also implying that he's physically sustained himself on the deterioration of Lucky. And then Vladimir says, after having sucked all the good out of him, you chuck him away like a. Like a banana skin.

19:40 Wes: Vladimir abuses him for the way he treats Lucky and all that stuff. And Pozzo ends up collapsing, right? Well, Vladimir even uses the word crucify. He's crucifying Lucky. But. But Pozzo's claim is that Lucky is killing him. He used to be so kind, so entertaining, so helpful and entertaining, my good angel. And now he is killing me. But anyway, I guess I wanted to kind of lead into that twilight speech that he gives. So it's another great speech. And then we'll probably have to talk about Lucky's speech as well. Let's read the whole thing. Just kidding. So everything seems black to him today. Except the firmament, says Pozzo. But I see what it is. You are not from these parts. You don't know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you? And then he makes sure that everyone's looking at the sky, including Lucky. Will you look at the sky, pig? Yikes. What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at any at this hour of the day in these latitudes when the weather is fine. An hour ago, roughly after having poured forth even since say 10 o' clock in the morning, tirelessly torrents of red and white light, it begins to lose its effulgence to grow pale, pale, ever a little paler, a little paler, until poof, finished, it comes to rest. But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging and will burst upon us. Pop. Like that. Just when we least expect it. That is how it is on this bitch of an earth. Yeah. So what is that doing? What's the function of that speech, if there is any? You get the sense that it's another bit of parody of something that we might expect to see in a. In a play, right? Some sort of crescendo, emotional crescendo, along with a great speech. So maybe it's a parody of a great speech, but it also points to the concept of death, right? And the coming of night, which seems to be the alternative to the coming of Godot. Or somehow coupled to it, maybe.

22:04 Erin: I take it also to be this expression of balance that. That I've already talked about, the pairs expressing half of a dynamic. So in Night and Day, you have the two sides of the coin. Maybe one thing that I didn't mention, or maybe that we just alluded to, is Vladimir's obsession with his hat versus Estragon's, as we talked about with his boots. Right? And then not too long after this Night and day speech, Estragon will tell Pazo, he, meaning Vladimir, has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. So there's a sort of heads and tails, night and day. Night and day thing is kind of like a one damn thing after the other. But it's also yin and yang balance, the cyclicality of that or whatever.

22:53 Wes: So what do we make of Lucky's monologue? So they. Yeah, they have Lucky think, right. Given the existence is uttered forth in the public words of. Is it punche and watman of a personal God? Kwa kwa kwa kwa with the white beard. Kwa kwa kwa kawa outside time and extension, who from the heights of divine apathia Divine and thambia Divine aphasia loves us dearly, with some exceptions, for reasons unknown. But time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda, blah, blah, blah, for a long time. And apparently Beckett and the production he was involved in, he wanted this to be read very, very quick, as quickly as possible.

23:32 Erin: Well, this is the most Joycean part of the play to me. Yeah, I do. I really enjoyed, actually, the Lucky speech part of the 2001. That was the only one that I saw performed. I liked the fire and brimstone kind of element of it because I think of this, or I thought of it on the page and perhaps still do as being a parody of an academic kind of treatise. So I wasn't expecting the lucky performance in the 2001 adaptation to be so preachery from the pulpit. Kind of heir to it.

24:06 Wes: Yeah. So again, another evocation of religious questions and perhaps academic thinking about the existence of God or something like that. But it's all become fragmented, much like the play as a whole. Right. Maybe it's like someone took a play and took a bunch of phrases and Scrabble tiles and shook the bag and then put them back out on the board. And this is the play. This is the play you get with

24:37 Erin: the repetition of, for instance, the names or the different turns of phrase left unfinished. It is established, you know, the KWA KWA quas and all that. It somehow performs in this really absurd way, these themes of. It's like an expression of ellipses or something. Like the ellipses are somehow being contained within the words or the expressions with which he's sort of extending the time. Again, it's like this dilation. Some of the things that I just teased out that I was writing in the margins,

25:15 Wes: I have.

25:15 Erin: Waiting, uncertainty, time filling, suffering, irrationality, inability of speech. But, yeah, I don't know. Something like what you get from a lecture if you're kind of falling asleep, or maybe what you remember from something several days later. Something that was long and boring and you only caught snatches of it because you were only half paying attention. Something like the. The result of having heard a highfalutin and incomprehensible and maybe kind of boring lecture. You know, since we were on the pazzo portion. Pazzo pulls out his pipe and smokes one. And then. And then he decides to have another. And he says, the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. It occurred to me that this was a revision of the carrot idea that Vladimir and Estragon talk about. On page 13 in my edition, Estragon is eating the carrot and says, funny, the more you eat it, the worse it gets. Vladimir says, with me, it's just the opposite. Again, it. It two different. It's there. In other words, Estragon says, Vladimir, I get used to the muck as I go along. And then Estragon says, is that the opposite? Vladimir says, question of temperament. Estragon of character. Vladimir, nothing you can do about it. Estragon, no use struggling. I don't know. I really love this. The change in the carrot versus the change in you as you eat the carrot?

26:47 Wes: Yeah. The more he eats, the worse it gets. And Vladimir gets used to it. Estragon's question is getting used to it. The opposite of things getting the more you eat it. Right. Because you might think the more you eat, the better it gets. Right. That's the joke. The opposite would be the more you eat, the better it gets. Not getting used to it. And then. So why is the response there? Question of temperament and character.

27:15 Erin: Because it's still possible to get used to something. You get used to the muck as you go along. So you're just getting used to it, getting worse. So the question isn't whether or not the carrot has changed. I suppose the carrot is going to get worse. That seems to be the assumption. But it's just a matter of whether or not you can get used to that quality of it.

27:33 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the suggestion is that depending on one's character, one might get used to things or get more sick of them with time. And then there's the, you know. Right. If it's character, it's fate. If it's character, it's essence. The essential doesn't change and there's no use in struggling to change. There's no use in trying to be different. At Estreon, there's nothing to be done, so you can't change yourself. So this is, you know, this is the opposite. This is sort of the foil to existentialism. Right. Existentialism is predicated on the idea that existence precedes essence. So existence, as in the foundation to our free will, that we can freely choose something and aren't just reducible to some essence, to some deterministic essence that forces us to be one way or another. I did it because that's my character and there's nothing I can do about it. This is kind of an explicitly anti existential statement.

28:32 Erin: Well, I just took it as our way of a roundabout way of talking about Act 2 without actually having to go there. Second is never as good as the first.

28:41 Wes: Related to the pipe again.

28:45 Erin: Yeah, he says the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. So he has a slightly more tinged by privilege, a more positive view of the repeated activity. Still having some savor.

29:01 Wes: You know, you can be eating raw carrots and have them go from bad to okay or bad to worse. Right. Bad to worse. Is Estragon bad to okay? Is Vladimir? Or you could be eating really good chicken and wine and having a pipe. All these things that are much better to begin with than A raw carrot. And the pleasure degrades a little bit as you go along, but it's still much better than a raw carrot.

29:31 Erin: Right.

29:32 Wes: It helps to start our heart. Start from a good height so that when you come down, you're not hitting the ground.

29:39 Erin: That's true. That's true. But I like the idea of the. The entropy inherent in repetition, which seems to be like a. Like a meta joke about the play.

29:49 Wes: So, speaking of repetition. Yeah. Things repeat in the second act and we get Pazzo and Lucky arriving again, but this time Pazzo is blind and the rope is shorter. Yeah. What's the point of repetition here?

30:03 Erin: I love when Vladimir says reinforcements at last when they come on stage Again, very much to your point, that we're. We're sort of relieved to see them.

30:12 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. He's speaking for the audience at that point.

30:15 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. This time, again, I'm really intrigued by the. Either side of the scale. So. So there's a.

30:21 Wes: By the way, there's a lot of tedium. To my mind, before they arrive, they do a question and answer routines.

30:28 Erin: They insult each other for.

30:30 Wes: Insult each other. Yeah. They try all these different things to be interesting, but it's really just boring. They exchange insults, do their exercises.

30:39 Erin: They do the hat business because there's the third hat.

30:43 Wes: Yep. Speaking of logical routine. Yep.

30:46 Erin: And the idea of the boots, whether or not the boots have been replaced, which also kind of is a recapitulation of the worst carrot, in a way. There's sort of shades of the worst carrot in that.

30:58 Wes: Right. And then there's a suggestion that someone for whom you know, has come along, whose boots are too small for their feet, and then taken Lucky's boots, which means that, you know, Estragon's boots must be. Sorry, Estragon's boots. Which means they must be bigger than that person's boots.

31:17 Erin: And yet somehow that they might fit Estragon. Right. So. But they will have simply gotten smaller. So there's.

31:23 Wes: They must be smaller and yet they fit Astragon. Yeah. So.

31:26 Erin: Right. So again, there's a. There's an entropic quality. Yeah.

31:31 Wes: It's a failure of what kind of. Maybe in math is transitivity or something like that. If A is smaller than B and B is smaller than C, then A

31:41 Erin: should be smaller than C. Exactly. And one of the things also that I just wanted to point out about the ways in which maybe the play behaving in absurd ways even extends to the scaffolding in the text of the play, the stage directions. Reading it, I Think is a really important experience in addition to seeing it. Seeing it bring something, obviously, to the text. It's meant to be seen. But also, if you were only to see it, then you would not have the experience of discovering that the characters sometimes contradict the stage directions or don't seem to acknowledge the stage directions. So if we were just to see this play, we would. Or we wouldn't know, or maybe we would question the fact that these are, in fact, just Estragon's boots from the day before. We're told in the stage direction that they are Estragon's boots, but the characters argue over whether or not they are.

32:34 Wes: And they're said to be a different color. Yeah.

32:36 Erin: Estragon and Vladimir argue over whether or not the tree, you know, the instructions that were given them, I suppose, is that Godot was gonna meet them by the tree. Then they argue over whether or not it's actually a tree. But of course, it's called a tree in the stage directions. There's another example of this, or even just the way that the tree kind of acts in a strange way that it's supposed to be the next day, but it has all these at least a handful of leaves on it now overnight. Or that Pozzo is blind overnight and Lucky is mute overnight. That's another undermining element or an unruly element of the way that the play is working, which makes it doubly absurd or even more questionable, ultimately. Whether or not we could read this allegorically, for instance, is that even the stage direction sort of seek to undermine any kind of stability in the text. Back to Lucky and Pazo. Now we have Pazo being blind. And so the interesting dynamic, which is granted, made more obvious or more. More definitive in Act 1 by the fact that, of course, Lucky is loaded down with all these bags and Pazzo has a whip, is complicated. Or maybe the. The complication that was already there in this image of the two of them yoked together by the rope is just more apparent in Act 2, where Lucky is actually preceding Pazzo, right. Going before him. And so now we can say that Lucky is leading him around in Act 2 because of Pazo's blindness. So again, there was already kind of an uncertain. I mean, it's on the one hand, very clear power dynamic between them, of course, but on the other hand, something interesting is happening visually on stage, even in Act 1, where, again, this idea of balance, or either side of the scale where they're tied together, the power dynamic, obviously, then shifts really definitively in the second act, where Pozzo is being just led around by Lucky.

34:34 Wes: Basically, we get. In the end, when Pozzo arrives, he asks what time it is. And then there's some question of whether it's, I think, evening or dawn, right? Estragon and Vladimir argue. You know, Vladimir says it's evening. But, well, Vladimir actually says something very, very interesting. It's evening, sir. It's evening. Night is drawing nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it, and I must confess, he shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through this long day. And I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory. How do you feel now? So, right, we're coming to the end of the play seems to be the suggestion, and he knows it. And then we get the stuff with Pazzo claiming that the blind. Oddly. So here's how he puts it. Don't question me. The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them, too. Vladimir says, well, just fancy that. I could have sworn it was just the opposite, right? So that he should be a Tiresias if he's blind, right? He should be a character who is prophetic, who can tell us what's in the future. But Pazzo doesn't even want to be, you know, he gets very irritable later on. And Vladimir says, dumb. Since when? Right? They keep asking them these time questions. Pazo says, have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It's abominable. When? When? One day. Is that not enough for you? One day he went dumb. One day I went blind. One day we'll go deaf. One day we were born, One day we shall die. The same day the second. Is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. And then on jerks the rope and says on to Lucky. It's reminiscent of the Twilight speech, right? Which also ends with night. But it's much more staccato. It's briefer. It's got the staccato quality. It's more impassioned and maybe authentic, less pompous. It doesn't come across as the same sort of parody. It's heartfelt and it's almost like a reduction, like in cooking, right? It's reduced more to its essence. But once again, night, Right? Yeah. Night person. And then distance between morning and night has been collapsed in Pazo's original speech, I think, right? There's. He sort of hesitates and fumbles around the idea that the light has been going all day long. And you get some sense of some expanse of time. And here all of time is collapsed, right? You give birth astride of a grave, as if nothing happens in between. Or there's not time enough for anything to happen between. Everything is the same moment.

37:22 Erin: That's right. And then Vladimir will take that and expand on it in what I think is maybe the most Shakespearean speech. Yeah, he does dilate that a bit. So he says. So here's. Here's the full little paragraph. Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do? What shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot. That Pazo passed with his carrier and that he spoke to us. Probably. But in all that, what truth will there be? He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth down in the hole, lingeringly the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old, the air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking. Of me too, someone is saying. He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on. I can't go on.

38:28 Wes: What have I said with Pazo? It's as if birth and death are happening in the same moment. But as you. As you point out, Vladimir dilates this, so to speak, with the forceps. Right, so. But. But it's the gravedigger is there lingering, you know, doing things lingeringly. Right, so. So it actually takes a lot. The birth takes a long time. And the whole process of birth is the duration of our lives. And we have time to waste them, to be bored, to not do anything, to kind of live a death in life, which is much worse than the thing that Pozzo was talking about.

39:07 Erin: And habit is that death. This is the second, I think, use of the term. In the play a few pages earlier, Vladimir says. All I know is that the hours are long under these conditions and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which. How shall I say? Which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit beguiling the time tomorrow, sleep. All this stuff is, you know, very Macbeth also, of course, very Hamlet. But.

39:35 Wes: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I noticed this too. Yeah, the tone of the speech. Yeah, it's very high.

39:40 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah. So he becomes Vladimir, becomes Really quite profound over the course of Act 2. So maybe that's one thing that sort of pushes against the entropy reading. This idea of habit, I think, is introduced rather late. It's an interesting characterization of what's gone on. Is it habit that they've been waiting for, Godot?

40:02 Wes: Well, there's something passive about habit, right. Because we're not deliberating and we're not taking conscious action. We're just, you know, we're doing what we do out of. Out of habit. I mean, it sort of. It speaks to that whole thing with the carrot. Right. And getting used to something. Right. As a matter of habit. If you eat enough, you get used to it. And it'd be inert to whether, you know, it might be the habit of eating the carrot sort of blinds you to something that's better, something that's more tasty. And the same thing in life. You sort of get into death drive mode. And the parts of life that you know would involve more vitality, you are habituated out of. Out of seeking that, out of inhabiting that. Because you're in sort of inertia mode, I suppose.

40:52 Erin: But they don't eat the carrot out of habit, right? I mean, everything they're doing, they're doing out of a kind of desperation. And they're eating the carrot because they don't have anything better. And when they have something better, even if it's just scraps, they'll take that. Or Estragon will.

41:05 Wes: Well, they're waiting, you know, they're desperate because their attention is on. They're in expectancy. Right. To use that word that Seneca uses, a state of expectancy. And the expectancy impoverishes the present and it leaves us with carrots and turnips and raw.

41:25 Erin: Oh, I like that.

41:26 Wes: Carrots and turnips. Yeah. And as opposed to something richer, you know, all the richness is put into the future. And people really do this with their lives. Obviously, they. They're holding out right for. For the big right for the prize that will only come if they. You know, it might be the asceticism of just working hard, but it. But. But sometimes it's just neglect, self neglect. Because, you know, one is focused on one's ambitions or some other form of salvation. It doesn't have to be ambition.

41:57 Erin: Drink the wine today, people. Eat the chicken today.

42:01 Wes: Carpe diem. Yeah. You know, I gave some classical quotes from Seneca about expectancy.

42:09 Erin: Is it Horus? It's not Horus, because that's. No, I think this seems too late. To be.

42:15 Wes: No, I think you're right. But my notes seized up. Yeah, it's Horus seized up.

42:23 Erin: Good one.

42:23 Wes: All right, so. Yeah. You want to give any final words, or is there nothing left to be done?

42:29 Erin: I was going to say, shall we go?

42:34 Wes: Yeah.

42:35 Erin: No. Used to say, yes, let's go. But then we're not gonna. But then there's gonna be five minutes. Five full minutes of just dead air, and then eventually it will end.

42:44 Wes: What are we waiting for if we can't go? We must be waiting for something.

42:52 Erin: Wake me up before you go. Go.

42:55 Wes: Yeah. All right. Thank you.

42:57 Erin: Thank you.

Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.

Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Wes: Who is Godot? Whether God objet a or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation, even if they can't remember exactly what it is that needs saving. Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy, aspirational, libidinal, political or religious, insofar as they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible, except arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Becket is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully. It was just an association. And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett. I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play?

1:51 Erin: I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class. It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam. And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett.

2:28 Wes: So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that?

2:33 Erin: I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett, and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward. Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play? Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam. Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it. And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to appreciate an adaptation of it. So the version available online from 2001 I find to have some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one. That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work. So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be.

4:00 Wes: Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford, director Michael Lindsey Hogg. And was it BBC? Is that.

4:12 Erin: Yeah, I think so.

4:14 Wes: Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good. You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la. There's no video.

4:23 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I heard that.

4:25 Wes: But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting.

4:29 Erin: Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart?

4:33 Wes: No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at. I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play, which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right? And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with different emotions. You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true. Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice. Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen. It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play?

5:37 Erin: It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it.

5:43 Wes: It's like who's on first for the whole.

5:45 Erin: Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy. I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play. Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again. You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected. And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny. You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something. That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation. But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience, really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it.

6:48 Wes: Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up. Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you. The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse. Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a. It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness. Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right. So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element. But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory?

8:05 Erin: I hope not. I hate allegory.

8:08 Wes: Why do you hate allegory?

8:10 Erin: I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me. Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast. I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily. The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about? And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about? As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it. And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath. And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material. So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge. And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something. So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to me. And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical. But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio. If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest.

10:19 Wes: Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about. That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and. And so I'm.

10:32 Erin: But you don't do it in that way.

10:33 Wes: And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that. So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution of some unconscious intent or something, something like that. I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and. Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference. But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read. You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right? So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed to represent some conceptual level. So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer. It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place. So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play. He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're. You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind. So then. Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right? It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get. Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse. It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way. So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent? These are very suggestive names, right? Estragon is just French for. For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things. Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it. Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego. Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot. In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike. And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways. And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels. Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another. Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people. They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological functions. But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's. And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader. Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it?

14:58 Erin: I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be. I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college. And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory. I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols or its series. Right.

15:33 Wes: It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized. But you.

15:39 Erin: You know, the biblical illusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory. Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory. So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay or what have you. You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness, or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti. Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit. I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it. Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical. I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness. But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done. The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going. I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted into a film. Like the who's on first Routine.

17:50 Wes: Right.

17:50 Erin: If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine. So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less. I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind of nothingness.

19:04 Wes: The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play. Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after. It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it. He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say? Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled. Funny, Nothing to be done. And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part. Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set. So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming? I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer. What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Giddo. God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation. They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God. But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved. I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears. Its course lies wholly toward the future. He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live. And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea. That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature. This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating what you have. So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on. I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all. All the same. What is it referring to?

21:51 Erin: Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness. I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose. So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward. So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way. Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of. And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation, their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that.

22:53 Wes: Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive, maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive. But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile. So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is. Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it. It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place. Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come. And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us. Right. Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next. And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Death Strangleman will say, yeah, that's the idea. Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights. But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction. And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience.

25:26 Erin: You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to. The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation. Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know. I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me.

26:00 Wes: But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place. Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes. And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope. That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage. You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond. But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very local space and time.

26:39 Erin: Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things. But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play. And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater, Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way. So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated. You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical. Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there. But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it. Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously. It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position. So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being. I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing. Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be. The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that. Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it.

29:29 Wes: Ye.

29:30 Erin: So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done. It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play. And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it. And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning.

30:36 Wes: Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit.

30:40 Erin: Absolutely.

30:41 Wes: A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play.

30:45 Erin: But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning. So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more negative view of life. An idea of total negation that one would think would be suggested by some of this language. One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea of being nothing or of nothing being right. The play doesn't end in a death or anything like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time. Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent. They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead. Neither of them ends up saved either.

31:58 Wes: If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's something happening, so that there's some sort of action. And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right? With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to. That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right? You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up. And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it. Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Nestrokop says. Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing. He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for Godot. And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in. It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense, we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that. But none of that is ever going to be satisfied.

34:25 Erin: Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract, which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing. Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply. All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute. No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man. On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago. In the 90s. So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track. It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night. He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it. Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man. Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s. And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide.

36:29 Wes: Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up.

36:35 Erin: Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up. Yeah.

36:41 Wes: Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide. I think that seems to be the suggestion.

36:54 Erin: Oh, I see. No, interesting.

36:57 Wes: Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide. Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built?

37:13 Erin: Yeah, I think in the late 1880s.

37:16 Wes: We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get macaw.

37:24 Erin: Yeah, I never thought of that.

37:26 Wes: Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right. It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities. So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right. We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second. But the talk of Christ and all

37:56 Erin: that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way. So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but that they are in fact dead.

38:09 Wes: Or. What's the alternative reading of this?

38:13 Erin: We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point. So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since. So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness.

38:27 Wes: No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because. Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it. We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity.

38:42 Erin: Okay, Right.

38:44 Wes: Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it.

38:48 Erin: So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting.

38:50 Wes: But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what. To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too. Just kidding.

39:01 Erin: Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves. So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming. Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it. And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves. Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented. Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me. I'm not convinced by this part at all. The idea of repentance. I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway. Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible? I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels? Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy. Vladimir says, you should have been a poet. And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious? Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon. Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir. And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all. And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first. Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved story is not mentioned at all. So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of. An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that.

42:04 Wes: Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation. I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for. They'll be saved if only Giddo comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right? Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable? Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually exist? Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst. Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible? Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true. I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right. It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something. I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right. And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak. But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right. So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst. And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right. His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever. Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just. As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet. I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to what it is that Estragon is saying.

44:23 Erin: You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely?

44:26 Wes: Yeah.

44:26 Erin: I think what Estragon says is really nice.

44:28 Wes: They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other.

44:32 Erin: Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but.

44:35 Wes: Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon.

44:40 Erin: Yeah.

44:41 Wes: Lovers.

44:42 Erin: One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence. But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other, which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy.

45:18 Wes: Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon. So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca. Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak, almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier. And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit. He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir. In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more. That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting. If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy. He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce. So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much. He's just being stuck in. Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon.

46:49 Erin: I think he. I'm just. I don't know.

46:51 Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but.

46:54 Erin: No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up.

46:58 Wes: I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually. But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned. Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious. So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship, but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out? Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer. Again, so it's not just allegory. They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own. They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place. Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters. So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past. We don't know what their jobs are. If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway. Tramps.

48:07 Erin: Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two. I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit.

48:33 Wes: Lucky and Pozzo.

48:34 Erin: Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right.

48:36 Wes: All right, thank you.

48:37 Erin: Thank you.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.

Upcoming Episodes: Waiting for Godot, The Mummy

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of With Nail and I. We just got done discussing Danny and some of his commentary and the parallel between the end of the friendship between Withnail and Marwood and the end of the 60s thought we'd move on to the character of Monty and ultimately to a little bit what I want to discuss about romanticism and the urban versus the rural divide. But I thought maybe we should just start with Monty, since he's such a great character. They go, so Monty's with Nail's uncle and they go to his place to get the key to the cottage. Their solution? They're going to solve everything by going out into the country. Little do we know, but behind the scenes, Withnail has actually kind of sold marwood to the uncle, who's promised him some action if they can get the key, which sets up Monty's coming out to the countryside to intrude on them. Yeah, every scene with Monty in it is just fabulous. And some of the dialogue, his pomposity and then, as you mentioned before, double entendre. So, for instance, do you like vegetables? I've always been fond of root crops, but I only started to grow last summer. I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose. Withnail mentions geraniums. Monty says, little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts, prostitutes for the bees. There is, you will agree, a certain je ne sais quoi, something very special about a firm young carrot do help you anyway.

1:55 Erin: Yeah, what I love about his place is you look around the room and you realize that there's cauliflower in a vase rather than flowers, and then other vegetables are decorating the room in various places.

2:07 Wes: So.

2:07 Erin: Yeah, and it's very old fashioned English looking. So it sort of combines the brocade and the tapestries and the medieval looking England with gardening and having all these vegetables around and stuff. So he's sort of a synthesis of these wonderful English cultural touchstones in this one room. I think that when he says little traitors to Withnail's idea that he grows geraniums, I think he's calling Withnail a traitor for growing flowers.

2:39 Wes: Oh, I thought he was calling the geraniums traitors.

2:42 Erin: I wasn't sure about that. Yeah, the way that he said it, I thought it could be that. That they're traitors for growing geraniums. So there's something traitorous to one's sex about being interested in women.

2:54 Wes: Oh, yeah.

2:55 Erin: You know, that was the symbolic implication I took.

2:58 Wes: No, I think that's a good surmise.

3:01 Erin: One Withnail is going to be a pimp of Marwood just as he's a pimp, you know, over his geranium patch. Or whatever. But there's a lot about root vegetable. You know, I was thinking there's a lot about peeing in the film. There's a lot about time. We've covered all the. All the other drugs and stuff like that. But then there's a good bit about carrots. There will even be a marijuana carrot of sorts. Yeah. And he's cooking onions. He ends up killing the rats with onions. So more root vegetables.

3:29 Wes: Didn't think of that. Yeah. So when Monty comes out to the country, Right. So initially they hear him outside and they're afraid because they're worried about the poacher at this point, little do they know Monty is, at least for Marwood, the one that they should actually be afraid of. And then, of course, the, you know, they find out it's Monty ultimately. And then the next morning, our sense of what the cottage is, is transformed. I think it is almost like a rebirth because when they first get to the cottage, they've come from their swallowed flat in London, Camden Town. And of course, they're telling everyone they're, you know, in the. And the boondocks that they're not. It's not the boondocks. That's not the right term for it. But anyway, in the countryside that they're not actually Londoners, so that they won't be hated for being Londoners. But what I think they would get, thought they would get out of that has turned out to be very disappointing. You get some scenes where Marwood can appreciate the countryside, but that's a very small part of it. They end up at a cottage that there's no heat and there's no water and they're burning fire furniture to get by and they don't have any food. And ultimately the farmer brings them a chicken they have to kill and then cook in the oven seated in a seated position.

4:48 Erin: But like unaccommodated man.

4:50 Wes: Yeah.

4:51 Erin: Poor bare forked animal.

4:54 Wes: Yeah.

4:55 Erin: This is. Again, they're a little shrunken down person. They can deal with it seems they could strangle a chicken.

5:01 Wes: Right. Although Withnail fantasizes about having shot it and then is very fond of the gun while they're there and they go out fishing to shoot fish. It sort of becomes a right. Survival's once again at stake. You get the sense in the beginning of the film it's desperate and their very survival is at stake because of the condition of the flat and the fact that they have no money. And then they get to the countryside and it's the same thing. Although the contrast with how things go once Monty's there. Making them breakfast in the morning gives you the impression that, okay, this is self imposed. They just bring the squalor and the deprivation with them. They're at a perfectly fine cottage. It is what it is. It's in the countryside. But the sense of it having been so dire is really about them. So in the morning, there's Monty making up a really nice breakfast. And they, of course, could have just gone, I guess, grocery shopping at any time.

6:00 Erin: Well, that's. That's the one thing. Yes, definitely, and certainly they could do much better. But I also wondered how much of it had to do with the lack of money and preparation, not understanding what was in the cottage or what wasn't in the cottage. Monty's come up with a bunch of things in the car, it seems, but, yeah, they're just. They're just sort of hopeless when Monty's there. Just immediately becomes really cozy and lovely and. Yeah. And I think there's something too, about. As I mentioned, Monty's apartment in London is. Or his house in London, I guess, is a fantasy of Englishness. And then they come up to the cottage and the cottage has portraits of George V and Mary of Teck on either side of the fireplace. So there's a. It's an older England that they've gone into. They go into the Crow and Crown, I think it is. It's the pub where they meet the. The poacher and the old English army man, who himself is, you know, very much a type similar to the. The guy I love in the Brendan Fraser Mummy, the 1999 mummy, which we should cover on the podcast at some point. It's one of my favorites. You know, the old guy, the old military man who's living out this fantasy, still believing that he's engaged in a war or something like that, who lies

7:12 Wes: about having been in the military.

7:14 Erin: Withnail with nail. Yeah.

7:16 Wes: And he says, oh, yeah, I could tell. And then, yeah. Asks where he's stationed. He's like, Ireland. He's like, oh, crack at the Mick.

7:24 Erin: Crack at the Mick. Which I take to be, you know, there's, you know, Withnail's stories, which he repeatedly invents, do show tremendous aptitude as an actor. He's always playing a role or putting on a kind of a disguise. But then also, the way that Withnail sort of advances the plot or the improvised plot twists that he comes up with do seem very associative. I took that to mean that he or I took the Ireland idea as being Adopted from the Irish guy that had confronted them in the pub in Camden. So that he's getting back at the Irish somehow by imagining this military past where he used to just. Right. So there's a wish fulfillment element to all of his little improvisations, no matter how ridiculous they are. He also says he's currently a journalist and that they're doing a story on the. On the town and small town life.

8:20 Wes: Right, right.

8:20 Erin: And then later he says that they're going to set a movie there, which is, you know, kind of more on the nose wish fulfillment.

8:26 Wes: But we are multi millionaires.

8:29 Erin: We're multimillionaires. Right. Which maybe Withnail is. He just can't access any of the money because his father's alive, withholding it from him.

8:38 Wes: Yeah. We get the sense that he's going to end up all right financially if he's still alive. And in a way, like his uncle. Right. His uncle had aspirations as well when younger and now he's fine, he's gotten his money from somewhere, but.

8:51 Erin: Yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah. So maybe Monty is more psychologically, perhaps, just as threatening to Withnail as to Marwood. Not quite, but almost. Oh, yeah. So in the crow and crown, there are pictures of Elizabeth and Philip on the walls and there's an image of her coronation garb. So that would be the 50s. It is like they've stepped back in time. So there's something. If they're flat is the 60s and they have to escape the flat in order to find someplace that hasn't been destroyed by them in some way.

9:24 Wes: And I think that's pre modern. Right. So this is part of the romanticism. It's modernity and the urban are alienated and I'm going to find less alienated situation in the countryside with the simple folk and in being connected to nature and in a way going back in time. Which sounds like the point you're trying to make. Yeah.

9:50 Erin: It's as if the fantasy of the 60s, we're sort of seeing the reality of it. I mean, it could be that this is representative of 69 and therefore the failure of the promise of the 60s. Or this flat represents the entire decade and the fact that it's actually been downhill from the social fabric. And yes, the sort of fanciful or the loose grip on reality that the military guy represents, but still functioning and connected to real life in terms of just active, practical things like farming. That the 60s are being represented maybe as some kind of aberration in all of this.

10:29 Wes: Well, I think that the countryside doesn't turn out to be such a great thing after all. And partly, as I mentioned, I think they bring their problems with them, of course, but also we get the sense that the natural, which is supposed to be better, turns out to have its own sinister undercurrents. So, right, the bull, there's the randy bull. So it's not all great being out there in nature. There's a sexual power to nature which can be persecutory. The natural is about what grows and ultimately about the sexual. Monty is interested in carrots not just because they represent penises and not just because he's obese and likes to eat, but. Right. He's interested in the romantic connection to nature, which is also a kind of connection to sex, I think. So they're going to be just as fearful of, say, the poacher, although he turns out to be more benevolent and initially afraid that the poacher is trying to break into the house and all that stuff. But what I'm trying to say is that. And in the figure of Monty himself, I think you get romanticism as representative as having the sinister exploitative undercurrent. So just to give an example of some of Monty's great speeches, where right in that breakfast in the morning, it seems like everything is now coming up roses. Everything is transformed. It feels like the vacation that they wanted might be coming together because they have a nice breakfast. But then we start to get Monty's stuff. He says the old order changeth, yielding place to new. And God fulfills himself in many ways. And soon, I suppose I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumor. Some vulgar little tumor. I love that. Oh, my boys, my boys. We're at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in, shat on by Tories, shoveled up by labor. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world. Sounds a little bit Matthew Arnold esque.

12:34 Erin: Let us be true to one another.

12:36 Wes: Right, Right. Yeah, exactly. And he's going to hit on Marwood. What else from the countryside? When they're walking in the countryside and he's talking about they do their thing where they want the finest wines known to humanity of a grapevine. So later at dinner, surrounded by trees in nature, one feels a glorious stirring of the senses, a rejection of the poisonous inhibition and a fecund motion of the soul. All the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. Because Marwood makes a comment about the fact that the squalidness of the cottage interferes with the pleasure. He's like all the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. When I was a lad, I'd rocket off on my tandem with Wrigglesworth and we'd just ride and ride and at night we'd find some barn and fall asleep with the perfumes of nature sighing on our skin. Yeah, just great, great stuff. But in the end, right, all of that, what does Monty represent? He's given up on ambition, he tells us, but he looks at it with a certain kind of nostalgia and resignation. He's nostalgic also about the loves of his youth and he's representative of what might happen to Withnail after giving up. But also I think he's representative of the sinister undercurrent of romanticism and the countryside, which is that it's not all just carrots and roses, carrots and geraniums.

14:08 Erin: It's also stick.

14:09 Wes: There's, you know, the natural world is dangerous, it's violent, it's driven by sexual instinct. All of that stuff comes out in Monty.

14:18 Erin: He's a bit sad, you know, the way that he leaves and all of that. I mean, he's been humiliated kind of because of Withnail. But, you know, when I say, let us be true to one another, he does have a kind of. His singular moral code seems to be faithfulness and so lets Marwood off the hook because he doesn't want Marwood to be unfaithful, untrue.

14:38 Wes: I mean, he does try to rape him, essentially,

14:44 Erin: but he has stopped.

14:45 Wes: I mean, he does have some burglary,

14:48 Erin: he does have some, some more than natural, you know, he has some guardrails. Yeah, I thought, I thought a little bit about, about the fact that they're in the Lake District and what role Capital R Romanticism is playing here. Because one would think that this is a place which historically, for the last couple hundred years anyway, hasn't been totally devoid of artistic types. You know, I love the moment when Withnail yells up at the sky in that kind of Caspar David Friedrich beautiful vista, where he says, I'm gonna be a star. So I don't know what to make of all of that or that, that particular moment where rather than appreciation of the grandeur of nature, he feels defiant and he's going to be part of the cosmos in a purely self serving way, which then the idea of a star comes back in the Hamlet soliloquy at the end of the film where it turns sour for him. But yeah, he has a delusion of grandeur in this moment. That he's going to get the better of all of these men who have been oppressing him, you know, as if, like, you could fight a bully with this idea that you're gonna be a famous actor. But, yeah, I don't know. I was trying to reconcile all of that, what Wordsworth and Coleridge have to do, maybe with Marwood and Withnail, if the two of them are like a degraded version of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who themselves were friends living in the Lake District, who ended up having, you know, sort of difficult at times, artistic relationship. The King Henry in Penrith is another great pub name that they go to. Another historical English emblem of masculinity. If it's Henry VIII or some other Henrys, but especially Henry vii, they've gone into town to buy Wellington's. But then, of course, they take the money and immediately squander it on booze, which seems, you know, really. They really seem beyond help to me in that moment because I realize they want to get away from Monty and just be without him for a while. But he has all that great wine back at the cottage, so why they would need to immediately squander this money on Morbos is. It's a frustrating moment for me. So anyway, they go to this pub, the King Henry. They get kicked out. They go into the Penrith Tea Rooms. And then it's just old people. It's just all these old people that are having tea and want them out and they're trying to stay, saying that they're multi millionaires, that they're working on a film up here. The owner wants to call the police on them and says, we'll keep them here until they arrive. The police arrive. Marwood and Whiffnail just then just walk out. They just get away because they can't possibly be held back by these old guys. So Monty shows up in the.

17:38 Wes: In the car.

17:39 Erin: Yeah, in the Rolls, which, you know, maybe they are multi millionaires. Maybe you should have given them some cakes.

17:47 Wes: Withnail says, we'll be back.

17:49 Erin: Yeah. Have you been to the Lake District?

17:52 Wes: No.

17:53 Erin: I've been to some towns like this in England and in Scotland, and if you go into some of these places, there is. It is just like an older clientele.

18:01 Wes: Dodgy older.

18:03 Erin: They're great for that reason, but I never came roaring drunk into one, so I never had a bad time.

18:10 Wes: Have you ever gone roaring drunk into a stodgy establishment where you shouldn't be roaring drunk?

18:17 Erin: No.

18:18 Wes: Yeah. I can't remember if I. You know, I probably did, but I can't remember.

18:23 Erin: That's a great thing about these things. They take care of themselves. The embarrassment just goes away.

18:29 Wes: I know my friend Lebec and I used to quote that bring us the finest wines known to humanity. Frequently.

18:38 Erin: Yeah. And then this interesting thing with Monty happens where he admonishes Marwood, which I think must be for squandering the money, you know, it must have been.

18:49 Wes: Yeah. Monty's very upset with them.

18:51 Erin: Must be because they're so drunk.

18:52 Wes: Wellingtons and. Yeah, being drunk.

18:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Because they were going to tell him the story that. Oh, don't worry, we'll just tell him there was a farmer's conference and there was a run on these Wellingtons or something, so. So we couldn't buy them, so we had to squander the money. But I think when he picks them up, they must be so drunk and so out of it that he could tell what's really gone on. And so, yeah, so the suggestion is that Marwood is leading Withnail astray, which made me wonder if Withnail was leading Marwood astray throughout the film. He's certainly getting him into bad situations because of his big mouth.

19:23 Wes: I see Withnail as the bad, bad influence.

19:26 Erin: He's causing problems for Marwood. But is he actually. He's not successfully leading Marwood astray? I wouldn't say.

19:34 Wes: Well, Marwood says, what about the Wellingtons? And he says, bollocks to the Wellingtons. Right. So, yeah, there are many instances where Marwood is sort of. There's a bit of a survival instinct and you know, from the beginning of the movie to the end. And it's reflected in the fact that he actually gets an acting part. He's the one who comes to realization they can't keep going on this way. And he's going to go out and get tea. And there's a funny. When they get to the cottage, there's a funny point where he's like, okay, we're going to separate into fact finding groups. Groups of one. You'll deal with the water and I'll deal with the fire. Something like that at least has some interest in practical problems and in solving them. But yeah, he frequently just. It seemed to me he'll just do. He's very fearful. And that terror, as I mentioned, comes across from the very beginning of the movie. And you see it. It's a great comic effect in both the them. But like with the guy, the Irishman who calls them ponces, just the level of fear that Morrowood gives off in the bathroom looking at the graffiti, worried about being raped ultimately. But, yeah, it seems to me he operates from the position of fear and is being carried along by Withnail's libertine, debauched attitude towards life, which is something Withnail can probably afford, as you mentioned, in the long run, more than he can from a financial perspective. He's got to do something, right? Withnail, in a way, can go on to be his uncle. Right?

21:13 Erin: Yeah. But I think there's something about Marwood which is really, despite Withnail getting him into scrapes and things, which is constitutionally impervious to Withnail. I mean, remarkably so. And maybe that is ultimately down to the class difference, too, that Marwood has to be more practical, has to be more scientific word he uses, or is more keyed into reality. The thing I really don't get about Marwood is why he smiles so much at Monty, which seems so unnecessary and needlessly encouraging from the beginning, when Monty is reaching around him to get into the bags. Why he doesn't just step away out of Monty's way instead of physically allowing himself to be put in this really compromising position is very.

21:59 Wes: Yeah, Withnail calls him out on this, right?

22:01 Erin: Oh, yes, yes. Yeah.

22:02 Wes: Marwood says, I got a cramp in the mouth from grinning. Stop smiling at him. I can't help it. I'm so uptight with him, I can't stop myself. But he does a lot of that. When the Irish guy comes up to them, I think they both give off. They do that smile of terror, like this terrified smile thing where they're just deer caught in the headlights and they don't know how to do anything but smile.

22:25 Erin: Well, Withnail's way of dealing with that kind of terror seems to be to out submissive himself out, you know, like he's going to go all the way in the submission direction and sort of fawn, like when he says he has a heart condition, you know, he's going to make himself into the wimpiest wimp in the world, you know, to try to get the guy to leave him alone. And then I think Marwood learns from that. He learned something about that tactic, maybe from Withnail, but one would think that he would be a better actor and he would understand. Obviously, Withnail has created a situation where Monty believes something about Marwood, which isn't true. And in the end, Monty's humiliation is all on with Nail's head. And yet, at the same time, Marwood has also been needlessly encouraging him with this, like, weird smiling throughout the entire every single one of his interactions with Bonte. And he doesn't just step out of the way. He doesn't just act as though it would just be a normal thing to step out of the way. And so it's a little frustrating to see his resignation or passivity or when he's complaining about being too high and he gets kind of whiny. It's a moment where, again, I kind of break sympathy with Marwood. I think that for somebody who has gotten an acting part as a. No, I guess not as a soldier. That was the part that he originally went for, was the soldier, but instead he's gonna be the lead, which maybe is, you know, head soldier. But anyway, somebody who was able to successfully get this part, one would think that he would have a little more gumption, is what I'm trying to say. And yet ultimately his passivity doesn't stand in the way of him getting the part.

23:56 Wes: Well, it sounds like. I mean, he wasn't necessarily passive in that aspect of his life. From my point of view, I don't find either of them sympathetic except in a comedic sense throughout the movie. I'm not. They're both so absurdly terrified of everything and everything's an emergency, you know, running out of wine. You know, as Withnail says, we've got some very distressing news. We're out of wine. As he's pouring himself the last cup of wine.

24:26 Erin: Well, but Marwood is the one we're supposed to identify with to a certain extent. Right. We get his interiority. We.

24:31 Wes: Yeah, a bit more. But I think your point is well taken. It's kind of hard to. He's got some of the seeds of more of a more realistic orientation towards the world and towards a bit of a survival instinct and something that's working against self destructiveness. Right. Withnails is a force of pure destructiveness and self destructiveness. And Marwood seems to have been very induced by that and is almost as bad in many ways. Not as angry, not as envious and more passive than. Than Withnail, but in a similar psychologically abject state. Right. We don't see Marwood transformed as a character. We don't get to really see the arc. It all happens behind the scenes. He's planted the seeds with an audition, and in the end he gets the part and cuts his hair and leaves. And so that's the moment where he actually does something that's not completely passive. He's going to leave with nail and he's not going to even let him walk him all the way to the station. That's the first time I think he really genuinely asserts himself in the film.

25:41 Erin: I think there is a slight moment of transformation when Monty leaves and leaves that note for them and Marwood reads it and feels quite sorry for him.

25:50 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah.

25:51 Erin: He tells Withnail, you'll suffer for this. What you have done will have to be paid for. And then it is immediately paid for by the knock on the door, because it's the telegram telling him, Right. That he's gotten the part.

26:04 Wes: Good point. Yeah. When he tells off. Yeah, that's the big.

26:07 Erin: Yeah, yeah.

26:08 Wes: It's a big deal. When he really, really tells off Withnail. Yeah, that is a big change.

26:13 Erin: Yeah, you're right. Then he cuts his hair and refuses the drink, says that he doesn't have time. Right. This is another return to the time motif because Withnail has been driving furiously to get to London. He keeps saying that he's making time over and over again. Again, this idea that if he speeds in the car, you know, this connection to speeding. But of course, as always happens, you have to pay for it. Just like the description you read in part one of Marwood talking about speed, that eventually it catches up with you and seeps through your pores or something like that. In this, in the same way, Withnail is stopped by the police. And then ultimately, of course, getting arrested takes a lot more time, so you might as well have gone the speaker lament or something.

26:57 Wes: Richard E. Grant had never. I don't know if he had never had a drink, but he had never been drunk and was a teetotaler.

27:03 Erin: Oh, no way. That's so funny.

27:06 Wes: Yeah, so Bruce Robinson, the director, writer and director of the movie, had him, insisted that he experienced being drunk. And so they got him very drunk until he vomited. You can see there's a little 20 minute documentary online if people want to look at it and see the actors talking about all of this. Yeah. So Robinson, in that documentary, talks about what a great job he thought that Grant did, pretending to be drunk and then pretending to be drunk, trying to pretend to not be drunk. Like when they get stopped by the cops. And he gives that look to the. Just the look on his face that he gives to the cops. And when he says, I've only had a few ales, they open the door and he practically falls out of the car because he's leaning so heavily in the door. So sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to put in that little tidbit about. And Richard E. Grant is so great in this.

27:55 Erin: Yeah, he Is. Yeah, yeah, he says, you know, Marwood says, I'll be late. You know, I have to go to the station. I'll be late. And Withnail says, there's always time for a drink. This is the final part of the film, and Marwood insists that he doesn't have time. So he's gotten out of the tractor beam of. With Nell squandering time or, you know, wasting time. He's been able to not. Not waste time anymore and get out of this cycle or whatever. And then with Nell, ends with a Hamlet soliloquy which begins, I have of late, but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth. So there's this idea of lateness and having run out of time inherent in the beginning of that speech. And then he talks about the roof fretted with golden fire and how that's all nothing, so that he seems to have lost his. This is almost like his parting speech where he, like Monty, knows that he will not play the Dane. And being a star, being the golden fire and the hanging firmament is not going to be possible for him or no longer meaningful to him.

28:54 Wes: It seems man delights not me. No, nor women neither. Nor women neither. Speaking to your point about the lack of women in the film and any romantic interests for that matter, I don't

29:06 Erin: mean to make too fine a point of that, but I think there's something really sinister about that. The lack of interest in women or discussion of women at all.

29:13 Wes: Well, it goes along with drinking lighter fluid. There's a whole collection of related sinister things.

29:20 Erin: Right. What goes along, too with, I think, creative stagnancy. I wanted to talk because him saying this speech, I guess, to the wolves reminds me of the various. Just of the names in the film. So we never get Marwood. Right. It's just on. I looked it up. How come the character's name is Marwood in this script that you sent me and it appears on a telegram. That's the only way that we know that his name is Marwood.

29:47 Wes: So the original screenplay has Marwood as the name, but I don't know if they put that in after the fact. But as you can buy it, like, if you buy the original screenplay, it'll say Marwood. It was on movies and materials related to the film during promotion. I don't know. But, yeah, it's purposefully. It doesn't come up in the movie. Is it really on the telegram?

30:08 Erin: I don't know. It just. That's what AI thinks. So take it, you know, for what it's worth.

30:14 Wes: Yeah, I think that might be a question. But anyway. Yeah. Purposefully. Right. Yeah. We don't. He's just I. Not Marwood.

30:21 Erin: Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because it is a. Like Withnail. You know, it's kind of a compound name. And so it got me thinking about names because the M is, you know, Withnail is, in a way, that upside down version of Marwood, just with the m and the W, I mean to say. And they're both. They're both compound words.

30:40 Wes: And then nail on wood and.

30:42 Erin: Yeah, right, right. Yes, that. And then also the farmer. Remember when they're trying to say, oh, don't you know, Montague Withnail, who lives in this cottage? And he's. He says, no, that guy. I think his name is French. And he calls him Adrian de la Touche, which is really, really good. But anyway, I looked up all of this because I was just interested in. So Montague means pointed mountain. And the transliteration, even in the closed caption on the Criterion Channel's version of With Nail and I, which is how I watched the movie, the transliteration of

31:21 Wes: Sisters with your captions.

31:23 Erin: No, no, I turned. No, I don't watch anything with closed caption. I turned it on to make sure that I got this right. And so he says, I. I seen a fat man, London type, queer sort. I think his name's French, or summit. And it transliterates his accent as S U M M I T. So his name is Montague. Right. Which means pointed mountain. And then the transliteration is Summit, which is really apartment and then I looked up De la Touche. Touch. What would. What's that about? So it means of the touch and touch, or Touche means small patch of trees of the small wood or thicket. So Marwood and Adrienne Delatouche. And, you know, there's some clever things going on with Marwood's relationship with Withnail and with Monty, even this imaginative name that the farmer has given Monty. It seems suggestive of what's going to happen, but only if you know what Marwood's name is. So it's kind of like a little in joke, maybe in the movie. Oh, and the other. Sorry. The reason why I brought this up is because Withnail is also experimenting with different stage names.

32:33 Wes: Oh, yeah.

32:34 Erin: He says at one point, he suggests that Desmond Wolf. And I thought that was indicative. Again, because there's so much symbolic masculinity going on in the various root vegetables and other things that Woolf was a desire to maybe put on A more. More masculine identity, more aggressive, perhaps. Marwood tells him it's too like Donald Wolfit, who was a famous English stage actor. And then later he suggests another name. So he seems to have borrowed Marwood's Donald and suggests Donald Twain. But then I just looked up, I was like, what's the origin of the name Donald? And it turns out that means world ruler, which, there's a lot to be said about that, that I prefer not to go go there. Who knew that Donald Duck, for instance, had to take one, had such a. An imposing meaning to his name. But, yeah, in the end, he's Desmond Wolf would be. Desmond Wolf is giving his soliloquy to the. The caged wolves in the zoo.

33:37 Wes: So in spite of all his rage, he's still just a Desmond Wolf in a cage. To almost quote one of my favorite songs. Are you Smashing Pumpkins fan?

33:49 Erin: I. I appreciate Smashing Pumpkins. I wouldn't call myself a fan. It's not really my cup of tea, but I've had a lot of people try to get me into it, so I've listened to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, but.

33:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Had to be able to embrace your melancholy side.

34:03 Erin: No, I do not by smashing any type of gourd, though, in my own ways.

34:11 Wes: What's the difference between a gourd and a root vegetable?

34:14 Erin: They don't grow underground. They grow on top of the ground.

34:18 Wes: Okay. All right. Well, on that note, that's a suitable place to end the well, to quote with nail. We can't go on like this. We'll have to stop. So.

34:31 Erin: All right, thank you. Thank you.

It’s 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” There will, he says, be many refugees, and the film’s implication is that Withnail—who combines self-importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor—will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall, in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that, while they threaten to outcompete the world’s attention for the arts, ultimately can’t be used to excuse the pair’s failure to find work as actors. Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious: leaving bohemian pretensions behind—and along with them, as Marwood finds out in their jaunt to the countryside—a backward-looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Wes & Erin discuss the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.

Upcoming Episodes: Waiting for Godot, The Mummy

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Wes: It's 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. There will, he says, be many refugees. And the film's implication is that Withnail, who combines self importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor, will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that while they threaten to out compete the world's attention for the arts, ultimately can't be used to excuse the pair's failure to find work as actors. Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious, leaving bohemian pretensions behind. And along with them, as Marwood finds out on their jaunt to the countryside, a backward looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis, but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Today we discuss the cult classic with Nail and I, and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin Olonick, and you're listening to Subtext. Okay, Erin, I didn't ask you before I suggested this movie whether you had seen it or not, and I was curious about whether you'd seen it and whether you liked it, but I thought I'd wait until the podcast to learn that. So, yeah. So what's the answer to that?

1:46 Erin: I was trying to figure out if I had seen it before and my memory. I don't think I'm making this up. I think I tried to watch it and got repulsed and stopped watching it because of the whole matter in the sink thing. But I really liked it and I thought it was hilarious. As long as you don't eat anything while you're watching it, I think it's okay. But the curve at the beginning was just getting over the few gross things going on, which all kind of happen at the beginning of the film. But did you see this, like, around the time that it came out, or what's your experience with it?

2:19 Wes: I saw this in the 90s. My friend John Lebec showed it to me. I think we should dedicate this episode to John Lebeck, who liked the character that Withnail is based on, passed away young, and I think in some ways there are situations. I lived with Lebeck and he was my best friend for a long time. There were times in my life where I think we didn't quite reach the level of Withnail and Marwood in terms of squalor and dissolution. But I think we were trying. We were trying to get there. And I think there's a kind of romance in that or there's a romanticization of that, and maybe that has something to do with its association with being a down and out artist. It's much more romantic if you can make the artist part of that work. But otherwise it just becomes, well, what is it they're feeling in the beginning of the movie? You know, terror, I think at least Mara would nail is more angry, I think. But anyway, this kind of story, yeah, it does have an appeal to me. I'm a big fan of Orwell's down and out in Paris and London, for instance. I don't know if you've read that there's another book called Keep the Aspidistras Flying by Orwell, which is the same sort of quality. The down and out story, it's not quite like this, but Bukowski, I think we talked about this before and you're not a fan, but his stories can be very much like this. They're autobiographical and it's about him being a boozer and trying to be a writer.

3:56 Erin: But.

3:56 Wes: Yeah, so I think part of the thing I was trying to think about rewatching this was. And it has been a long time, I think I saw it in the 90s and I saw it again at some point. I think this is the third time, but it's probably more than a decade since I've seen it. But I was trying to think, what is it that's so appealing about a story like this, if it is appealing to people? And then what is it that can appeal to people about putting themselves in this state, in this position? And then the larger question of how this is related to 60s counterculture, because, of course, it's set in 1969 and they've come to an end of an era. And the final stages of this relationship, I think, in a way are meant to represent the end of the 60s and everything, the good and bad of it.

4:44 Erin: Well, what I find appealing about it is just the dialogue. There are just so many funny lines. The hysterical moment where the police officer screams, get in the van.

4:54 Wes: Yeah. That is.

4:59 Erin: I had to pause it because I was laughing so hard.

5:02 Wes: Just completely loses it.

5:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah.

5:05 Wes: In the shrillest. Yeah, the shrillest possible voice. Completely loses control of himself.

5:13 Erin: Good cop, crazy cop or bad cop, crazy cop. I don't know what. What they're doing there, but for me, the film seemed to be less about this idea of what it means to be an artist per se, and instead this hopelessness about becoming a man, that there was no route to maturity, that the future had been foreclosed for Marwood and Withnail in some way. And I think their particular artistic endeavor. So acting is about that same process. It's also about adopting another identity. Of course, they're male actors, so it's a male identity putting on another man or another life or another role, and therefore, perhaps training oneself in what it means to be that other man or in what it means to be a man in general. And then that's played upon, it seems, with these gay jokes that pervade the film with the idea of being maybe subject to other men or under the influence of other men, or even this actorly idea of putting on another man becomes this kind of joke in which they're putting on Monty. Monty himself is a former actor, I suppose. I don't know. Maybe. As I say that, I'm thinking, well, that really is about the artist's life. What probably just characterizes it more than anything is that one is subject to outside approval regard. Very little is under one's control when one is an artist. So. But I was more interested in this idea of manhood, masculinity and feeling like everybody wants to, yeah, screw you over and what that might mean. And kind of turning that into a joke about all the meanings of that phrase, which I'm putting politely, more politely than the film does.

6:58 Wes: Yeah. I think there's something there about the way in which a certain kind of aesthetic relationship to the aesthetic and to artistic ambitions leaves one vulnerable. Right. They get called a ponce. That's a big deal. By the Irishman in the bar. What's the name of the pub again?

7:17 Erin: There are so many great pub names. There's the King Henry, the one with the two Cs.

7:23 Wes: It's the mother black cap. They're called ponces at that point. Jake the poacher says to Marwood that he's a prancing tit and that he wants working on. Although the poacher turns out to be a bit more benevolent than they thought and ends up bringing them a rabbit in the end. So there's a certain amount of paranoia. I mean, there's a lot of paranoia in this, but there's the realistic, what turns out to be persecution by Monty, or at least towards Marwood. Monty turns out, really is after him sexually, even if it's going to mean burglary, as he puts it, which is great. But I Think there's two components there. One is being a bit more upper class. And so being a ponce. That sort of slur is not just about sexuality, although it is. It's about being a limousine liberal. That's actually a very poor way to put it. Or maybe it's more after the times, actually, at least the times in which the movie was made, that sort of accusation. But it's about being effete and not manly. So I think that's the relationship. That's the sort of position that being actors puts them in. It's not a manly thing to do. It's more feminine. I think that's the idea. Part of the movie is about the dangers of the romanticization of that sort of aspiration. You know, when we see Monty in the countryside, he has all these romance, right. The countryside itself, when they take that trip, there's supposed to be something romantic about it, right. In the larger sense, it's getting into the countryside and into a rural scene. Wordsworth and Keats and all that. And Monty himself has all this flowery talk, but it's a cover up for lust. It's a cover up for sexual persecution. And that's what romanticization of this sort potentially opens you. Opens you up to. So I think you're right. Yeah, it's about. There's a lot about masculinity and homosexuality. And I'm relating it here to the larger idea of being a vulnerability created by a more aesthetic attitude rather than practical attitude towards the world.

9:44 Erin: Acting not being a manly thing is doubly implicated here, both because as an artist you're not working with your hands, but also the particular trappings of being an actor. Doing things like putting on makeup, which Monty does at one point. The idea of playing dress up and then this idea of adopting another man's identity somehow almost as if it's like a. I don't know. I was. I was trying to think through that a little bit, this marriage that happens as an actor when you're assuming someone else's identity. So you stay yourself or you're using your own body as the kind of the vessel for maybe another man's identity. And so there's something perhaps inherently homosexual about that. But I think in every single episode in this sort of episodic film, there is some anxiety about male rape or about being bested by a man or in one instance, a bull. In every single part of the film, it happens over and over again. And when they're not explicitly talking about that, it's displaced into carrots and meat and other symbolic terminology. But the movie also has. I mean, we get Dani as someone who's their age, but also predominantly, they're just interacting with older men. Also the farmer. The farmer is sort of more closer to their age than some of the other men in the film, but predominantly they're interacting with older men when they're not interacting with, you know, the Irish guy at the pub or the poacher, like these bigger, scarier, more obviously manly type of guys. And there are no women in the film of their own age whatsoever, which is one of the first things I notice. They yell at those schoolgirls with. With Nell, yells at the schoolgirls out the window, scrubbers. Other than that, you don't see any women of their. I mean, not including that, you don't see any women of their generation. You only see those schoolgirls and then the older women, like, in the tea rooms in Penrith and the farmer's mother. So it's a world devoid of women and they're just really, really scared of the advances of men. And then in the cafe with the first scene where Marwood puts the kettle on and then goes down to the cafe, he's looking at the headlines in the newspaper and the first headline we see is, moment of fulfillment for local boy who became a woman. You know, the pipeline is boy to woman, nude. It's not boy to man. Right. There's no. This is the. This seems to be the crisis. How do you grow up and become. How do you become a man? Is the central idea, maybe, that Marwood and Withnail are struggling with. Are you. You can't really become a Monty. Monty has a whole history of montiness that obviously Marwood and Withnail don't share. You can't become the old drunk military man in the pub, and they're not capable of becoming Jeff Woad or the poacher or the big burly Irish guy. What is their route to manhood? Which is a weird thing because they both look old to be thinking about that, but whatever.

12:56 Wes: Yeah. Well, I want to focus a little bit on this news theme because I think it's the way the film starts and there's a relationship here to art as well, insofar as the news is what competes for attention with the aesthetic from others. People who are reading newspapers are not reading books. And in particular, it has to do with this salacious news. Right. So there's the woman becoming a man. Then there's the nude au pair's secret life. That's another headline These are real headlines apparently from the time and the way Marwood narrates this. And this is one of the great. There's just so much great dialogue, as you said, and some great voiceover as well. He says 13 million Londoners have to wake up to this. The murder and Albran and rape. And I'm sitting in this bloody shack and I can't cope with Withnail. I must be out of my mind. I must go home at once and discuss these problems and discuss his problems in depth. I thought it was these problems. It's written here as his discuss his problems in depth. When he gets home, Withnail is reading the news. And let's see, Curse of the Superman. Yeah, before that. There's just so many great lines in this I hate to skip over, but my thumbs have gone weird. I'm in the middle of a bloody overdose. I feel really dreadful. And then with nails, so do I. So does everyone. Look at my tongue. Gray yellow sock. And then goes on to talk about this curse of the supermen. People taking steroids to win competitions. Athletes like Jeff Woad. So in a world exclusive interview, 33 year old shot putter Jeff Woad, who weighs 317 pounds, admitted taking massive doses of anabolic steroids, drugs banned in sport. He used to get in bad tempers, says his wife. He used to pick on me, but now he's stopped. He's much better. In our sex life and in our general, the sex life of course comes first. And then, Jesus Christ. This huge thatch headed, this huge thatched head with its earlobes and cannonballs is now considered sane. And then Marwa would saying, please, I don't feel good with nail. That's what you'd say. But that wouldn't wash with Jeff. No. He'd like a bit of pleading add spice to it. In fact, he'd probably tell you that he was going to do what he was going to do before he did it. I'm going to pull your head off. No, please don't pull my head off. I'm going to pull your head off because I don't like your head. As you mentioned, this sort of paranoia about it's not just about sexual assault but it's about violence in general towards other men. Comes up quite a bit and this is just one of the instances of it. But it's connected here to this idea of the salacious events of the world. And so I guess I'm trying to draw a parallel. I'm trying to draw a connection here between the idea that being an artist makes you vulnerable to not just criticism, but to violence of some sort. And then the other idea here is that news of the salacious events of the world like this, in a way, is competition for attention. And so there's the potential to write. The real vulnerability for the artist is criticism from an audience or the disinterest, lack of interest from an audience. So that's also the kind of threat

16:34 Erin: that's being described here in this Jeff Wode instance. There's the idea too that you have to be a superman to get ahead. You have to be more than human somehow in order to achieve any kind of success in this world. And also inherent in that is this idea that you have to cheat because he's taking these, these steroids. But he's also already this huge guy, Withnail points out. Imagine the size of his balls. So there's always this, you know, imagine getting into a fight with him and that's then when he says, you know, he sort of does the imaginary dialogue. But this idea of sexual prowess is repeatedly linked with being superhuman somehow, or gargantuan. And Withnail and Marwood are kind of on the losing end of that. It occurs to me that even the poacher has a moment of being literally superhuman when he's, when he's pulling, you know, he pulls the eel out of his pants. And then he also has. He looks bigger than he is because it turns out he has, underneath his jacket, he's being sort of puffed up with the pheasants. It's almost like he has these prostheses that are making him more than human, more than just a normal man. And I. You know what's interesting too, in this, in the scene looking around the flat, they have these kind of Georgian style paintings on the walls. They almost look like Romneys. When Withnail is talking about the imaginary conversation with Jeff Woad, he walks over to the mirror and you see there's an illustration of kind of a medieval king sitting on the mantel that's sort of propped up against the mirror. And then there are also postcards of what look like palaces, probably. And it occurs to me that, you know, as you point out, this is also an anxiety of class. Oddly that though Withnail, not Marwood, I suppose, but though Withnail is upper class, that somehow leaves him vulnerable to the more vital, you know, working class men that could beat him up. And come to think of it, the king as an image of that is. Is also really interesting. This model of this medieval king with a Long sword. You have to be. You have to be at the top of the heap. Right. You have to be the king among aristocrats and therefore superhuman in that kind of way, almost to escape being seen as a feat somehow.

18:51 Wes: Yeah. So I sent you a kind of transcript of the movie, including some scene descriptions. And I don't know who did that. It's of the movie as shot and the original screenplay, as always, is different. But there's a lot of great writing in the original screenplay that doesn't make it into the transcript that we have and can't even be shot. So, for instance, despite the squalor, the room is furnished with antiques, heirlooms and other quality stuff. An indescribable melange of stuff crowds a low table. A large Victorian globe of the world soars above bacon rinds. So, okay, so all this stuff can be shot. I don't remember the bacon rinds. But anyway, objet d' art and breakfast remains compete for space. Then he says Dostoevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. That's the part that can't be shot.

19:46 Erin: That's in the scene description.

19:48 Wes: That's in the. Yeah. So he put it in there knowing, of course, this is supposed to not. You're. If you read a screenplay book, they told. Tell you you're never supposed to write stuff like that. That belongs in a novel. Right. It can't be shot, so it doesn't belong in there. But of course he put it in.

20:03 Erin: Well, it's conveys something to the scene dressers.

20:10 Wes: Yeah. He was also a novelist. Bruce Robinson, the writer and the director. And he was nominated for an Academy Award for adapting the Killing Fields. He wrote and directed how to Get Ahead in Advertising. Have you seen that?

20:25 Erin: I haven't seen it. I've seen the Killing Fields.

20:27 Wes: He worked with Truffaut as an actor. He was also an actor. He was in Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director. And part of this movie is based on that because apparently Zeffirelli sexually harassed him on set. I think we were forced to watch that Romeo and Juliet version in high school.

20:48 Erin: Everybody.

20:48 Wes: Yeah. Despite a mysterious topless scene. Yeah, well, Juliet gets topless. Right. It's like the weirdest thing.

20:55 Erin: Stories of, like, teachers just standing in front of the television screen during that. I think that's kind of a universal experience where they, you know, they like. It happens, whatever. Or you get somebody standing in front to try to block the screen for a minute.

21:13 Wes: A Lot is based on his personal life, as I've already mentioned. He really did have a roommate, much like with nail, who did drink lighter fluid at some point. And he said he's basically compressed what went on for two years into a couple of weeks. But I mention all this just because I think you've gotten that the sense in which the talk about Superman has something to do with the idea that they have to be supermen in order to get ahead. I forget how you put it. But in any case, part of this is about ambition. They, like Jeff Woad, are on drugs and they in a sense are pushing themselves to the limit to see the limits of human performance. There's something the Olympics being a bum.

22:03 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That hadn't occurred to me, oddly enough.

22:08 Wes: And once again the news is directly competition. So Withnail says at one point where he says, you've had an audition. Why can't I have an audition? This is a recurring theme with him. He's always envious, you have soup. Where's my soup? Turns out to be coffee that, that Marwood is eating with a spoon. In any case, he'll end up saying, the only program I'm likely to get on is the fucking news. So this is another point where we get this implied competition with salacious events of the world and with these manly supermen who are nevertheless cheating. So how are you going to get ahead under those circumstances? When I was going over my, you know, after, after watching it again and going over the transcript, I thought, yeah, it's really. There's a really interesting feeling of complete desperation and paranoia and imminent catastrophe, like the world is going to end. Which again I think, you know, part of that's meant to capture the end of the 60s, but it's really about ambition. I think, you know, they complain a lot in the movie about where they are with their careers not getting parts and you know, their trying to be actors. But you get the sense that this is kind of a portrait of ambition itself. Regardless of how one is actually doing in the real world with one's aspirations, there's a kind of desperation and potential internal psychological squalor that can crop up in relationship to one's ambitious ideals. Right. So you might neglect yourself and everything practical in life in order to, right, devote yourself to being an actor or an artist or intellectual or something like that. More generally we might neglect our well being in the service of some grandiose self conception of ourself unrealistic aspirations. So the drug addled squalor that they're in is kind of an extreme case of that. But it's sort of. One could take it as representing this real bifurcation that happens within people, even within a psyche between an abject shadow self, as Jung would put it, and more grandiose, manic self related to the idea of the powerful great person that one might be. Or if you're completely psychotic, that you think you are godlike. Yeah.

24:47 Erin: They're taking drugs puts them in something of that kind of position perhaps. Right. Because there's the repeated idea of time in the film and that they're toying with time by taking these drugs that they can throw away a day if they want to. Right. Doesn't Marwood say that at some point we'll go, we'll have a drink and then we'll take some drug. I can't remember what it is. Some kind of antidepressant maybe.

25:12 Wes: Let me read this. It's about Marwoods doing a voiceover. Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change, you lose, you gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills. But sooner or later you got to get out because it's crashing. And all at once those frozen hours melt through the nervous system and seep out the pores. Is that what you're thinking of? Such a great.

25:36 Erin: I was thinking of that. But as at a contrast to this moment, which I think I found. It's actually Withnail who says it. This is the plan. We'll get in there. This is when they're about to go into the mother black cap. We'll get in there and get wrecked. Then we'll eat a pork pie. Then we'll drop a couple of Sermontill 50s each. Means we'll miss out on Monday but come up smiling Tuesday morning. So they're planning on missing a day and just being. I think that's. That's what's going on there. That they're just going to be blacked out for a day. So there's the speeding up. Slow.

26:07 Wes: Hear about the drinking game associated with.

26:09 Erin: Yes, I did. Yeah. That's like the number one thing that came up on the search for. With nail and eye Lord try to

26:15 Wes: match with Withnail drink for drink. And at one point he orders. What is it? A quadruple whiskey and a pint or something anyway.

26:24 Erin: Right?

26:24 Wes: Yeah. You kill yourself if you really try to do it.

26:26 Erin: Yeah. But this.

26:27 Wes: Sorry.

26:28 Erin: Yeah. This. This idea of. You know. I think part of what you're suggesting about the news also. Also gets at this, right. There's a finite economy of time and attention, and. And you're trying to take a piece of that. And it occurs to me, too, that actors are among the unluckiest artists in that when you're not acting, you really do have nothing to do. You're just killing time between parts. It's not like if you're not being published or you're not getting your painting sold, that you, you know, your paintbrush is taken away from you. You could still keep working. I mean, it's difficult to do because it's difficult to work, you know, when your ego is being destroyed by not getting any kind of recognition whatsoever. But you can technically still keep going and keep working. But if you're not being cast in something, then you just. You can't do anything at all. And so this feeling of things being. I think you said there's a sense of dread hanging over the film and things kind of being over, or the idea that they're running out of time and the suggestion that it's because of the end of the 60s. I think that's true. But there's also the fact that the friendship is over. Right. Like, before the movie even starts, the friendship has basically ended. Because it seems like the dread from Withnail anyway is about knowing somehow that this audition is going to bear fruit for Marwood in some way, and so that has already caused the rift.

27:54 Wes: Did you sense that before the end of the movie? Cause I didn't. Yeah, I wasn't paying enough attention. So the ending caught me unawares, I guess. Yeah.

28:05 Erin: I think this is the tension between them from the beginning and the idea that Marwood is trying to establish sympathy or a connection between them by saying, we're in the same boat. And Withnail rejects that repeatedly. It's not just because Withnail's an egomaniac, though he is, and feels uniquely that he's suffering uniquely and. And uniquely entitled, though he does feel that way. It's also, I think, that he sees the writing on the wall, so he knows that Morwood is going to succeed and is on the way to some sort of success. I think that's part of it. It's like they start a clock on the end of the friendship, starting from the beginning of the movie. And. Oh, and there's also the fact that withnail is turning 30. There's the suggestion that one only has enough time to play Hamlet. Right. And Hamlet is, of course, about. Partially about dithering and wasting time and not dealing with time the way one should. And Monty says there comes a time when you realize you're never going to play the Dane.

29:07 Wes: Do you mind if I read it?

29:08 Erin: Please.

29:09 Wes: It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play the Dane. When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases. Don't you agree? It's a part I intend to play, Uncle. Which, of course, he does at the very end of the film when he does that speech. But that's a really good. I didn't think about that. Yeah. The relationship to time and dithering and even the irony of Monty saying you wake up and realize you're out of time to play Hamlet.

29:44 Erin: So, yeah, what does that mean? You're never going to get the opportunity, or you've aged out, or both. But really it means both. And with nail is turning 30. When you're far away from somebody up on a stage, you can get away with being a lot older than the part that you're playing. So presumably With Nail does have maybe 10, if not 15, if not 20 more years to play Hamlet, depending on how ridiculous the casting director is. But spiritually, maybe.

30:12 Wes: How old was Branagh when he played Hamlet?

30:15 Erin: Too old.

30:16 Wes: Seemed a bit too old. Yeah.

30:18 Erin: Yeah. Everybody who plays it on. On screen, you know, they. They've established themselves in it, which means they've been playing it for a long time, and by the time the screen adaptation comes up. So there's this idea that you could play with time. You could play with time when you're young and taking all these drugs and drinking all this, all these tremendous quantities seems to go hand in hand with this idea of youth. And youth seems to be something that you have to inherently squander. Something of that, I don't know, quality goes on in youth or is essential to youth that you're squandering it. And the 60s and youth culture and all of that is also running out. So I think, as Danny says, at some point they have to come down from the. From their trip with the end of the decade, and it's over now because they're selling hippie wigs at Woolworths, you know, so there's been some sort of. Some frozen in amber quality that's happening to the 60s, where it's possible to buy the trappings of the decade now in a store almost as a kind of costume, as a Halloween costume, or maybe as a, you know, a costume for an actor to then play the part of the 60s hippie.

31:27 Wes: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about Danny and then this connection that he makes between the end of the friendship and the end of the 60s. Right. So Danny is there. Maybe let's talk about the connection first, and then we'll get more into Dany's character, which is great. So Danny says to Marwood, you got the pirate man? Marwood says, I got a different one. They want me to play the lead. And then Withnail says, congratulations. And then they move on, or Dany moves on. Where exactly have you two been? Marwood Holliday, in the countryside. We don't know at this point that Danny is going to now eulogize the decade, but it's also, of course, a eulogy for the friendship. So Danny says, that's a very good idea. London is a country coming down from its trip. We are 91 days from the end of this decade, and there's going to be a lot of refugees. So of course, Withnail is one of those who's going to get left behind. Not everyone's going to be able to make the transition from. How do you characterize the 60s counterculture and youth culture and the kinds of aspirations it represented? And with, I would say, libertinism, sex, drugs and rock and roll and all that stuff. And in the end, the promise of all that didn't really pan out. And it's a sad moment. Right. Likewise, the end of the friendship of Withnail and Marwood is sad. And those two forms of sadness get connected. Anyway, Danny continues, they'll be going around this town shouting, bring out your dead. Reference to Monty Python. In fact, it's a reference to Monty Python, but It's set in 1969, before the Holy Grail movie was, in any case. Yeah. So going around this town shouting, bring out your dead. Which, of course, is where Withnail is at this point. And then they learn that they're going to be evicted. And it's partly because of what Danny's done with the landlord. Some bald geezer starts coming on really bald with me, it's a callback to the beginning of the film where he has a theory of baldness and uptightness. Is that it for Danny's eulogy? That and the idea when Marwood says he's not going to smoke any more grass, Danny says, that is an unfortunate political decision reflecting these times. And then finally Withnail says, what are you talking about, Danny? And Danny says, politics, man. If you're hanging onto a rising balloon, you're presented with a difficult decision. Let's go before it's too late. Or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question, how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They're selling hippie wigs and Woolworths men. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.

34:20 Erin: I was having trouble reconciling Danny's hatred of bald men with his hatred of wigs. But I guess they're one and the same. You gotta just grow your own hair.

34:30 Wes: Yeah. What does he say about it? It's like the. Let's see. I don't advise a haircut man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald headed men are uptight. It's funny too, because Robinson based this character actually off a hairdresser. His hairdresser. Yeah.

34:53 Erin: When he calls a judge's wig a far out looking hat and when Withnail tells him it's a wig, he's like, no, no, this was more like a long white hat. It's like, yeah, it does look kind of weird.

35:05 Wes: It's a story about the coal man is what he calls him. Yeah. Where he goes to court and he's wearing. He has a fancy get up and then. Yeah, but that. Yeah, that's a good point. Calling the. Yeah. Not realizing that the judge's wig is actually a wig. But yeah, I just also too wanted to say a bit about Danny because in a way he's representative of.

35:28 Erin: He's a real hippie.

35:29 Wes: Yeah. But he's kind of a sage of sorts or a drug guru. The idea that somehow drugs can enlighten you, which I guess is, you know, it's an idea very much associated with the 60s and give you some special sort of wisdom. But of course, in his character he just comes across the way he's delivering his lines, which are just slow and it's obviously high. He's drug addled. But there's also supposed to be something sage about him. And he has a lot of other great lines of his own. Like St. Peter preached the epistles to the apostles looking like that. Referring to Marwood's not having any clothes on. There are various points where he's acting in a sage like manner, like saying he doesn't advise. Right. When he. That quote I just read about not advising a haircut or his theory of bald men. And then the kind of precision that he uses when he talks about drugs. So, for instance, when he gets in this fight, this fight with Withnail, and says, don't get uptight with me, man, because if you do, I'll have to give you a dose of medicine. And if I spike you, you'll know you've been spoken to. If I'd medicine you, you'd think a brain tumor was a birthday present. And then ultimately challenging Withnail to take this drug, which he calls phenodehydrochloride Benzorax, which I looked up and is not real street named him the embalmer. And then later on, Marwood says, give me some Valium, I'm getting the fear. And he says, you've done something to your brain. You've made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, you'll do something else to your brain. You will make it low. Why trust one drug and not the other? That's politics, isn't it? So all these kind of sage sounding. On the one hand, he's so laid back, it's like Daoism. Yeah, he's a slacker. On the other hand, there's this precision. Talks about the law, gives advice, uses technical name for drugs. It's this interesting synthesis, this interesting combination of those two trends. So I thought. I just wanted to point that out about Danny because he's such a great character.

37:50 Erin: He's also emblematic of the boy at the same time that he is a sage, this sort of 60s youth who. I mean, he does have a lot of pretty insightful things to say sometimes, but he keeps himself in a state of suspended animation almost with these. With these drugs. Like, he talks about retiring and going into business, which I really love that, that phrase, which is paradoxical or. Or eboric or something. And Withnail says, I thought you were in the bottle industry. Which is great because there's this idea that he's going to retire from the drug business, which is he's going to put away childish things like being in the bottle industry, which obviously there's this suggestion of. Of the baby bottle inherent in selling. Whatever. Selling prescription drugs out of bottles or selling contraptions to get yourself out of drunk driving charges by keeping pee in a bottle or. Right. Whatever. Whatever it is that he's involved in. And that. That kind of confusion also comes up later when he talks about papers. And he had just been talking about rolling a joint. So he has joint papers. But then he really is talking about the eviction notice. So there's a kind of double Meaning there. But anyway, he says, no, I'm gonna go into the toy. The toy industry. That's the grown up thing he's going

39:07 Wes: to do with a doll that craps itself. Yeah, yeah, great point.

39:11 Erin: The toy idea is really rich. I mean, there is a. There's a lot in the. In the movie about peeing oddly things. Things happen when people pee first. There's this idea, you know, he also has a voodoo some point that its head comes off and it has pills in it. There's this idea of Marwood and Withnail and Dany of only able to. Only being able to deal with things that are smaller than themselves. Right? So when they're going to fight the rat and they get all charged up about fighting the rat, they have this vigor about that because they're about to confront something that's smaller than them rather than repeatedly encountering, as they do, men who are bigger than them who might fight them. So there, there's this sort of, you know, Russian doll quality where you're picking on whatever is smaller than you. And so this interest in dolls and the shrunken down thing seems to be related to powerlessness and needing to deal with something smaller than oneself. Also there's this really interesting sort of gendered quality to this too because he says, like, oh, little girls love these dolls. They can take care of these things. They can clean up after the messes that these dolls make and they even enjoy it, Right.

40:23 Wes: If they like dolls that pee themselves, how much more are they going to like dolls that crap themselves?

40:30 Erin: Right, Right. But also, Marwood and Withnail have made just a disgusting. Just a shithole of their, of their flat. Right? And they are incapable, it seems, of cleaning up after themselves. And the women that are missing from the movie, is it their job to clean up after these men that are like children that can't clean up after themselves? You know, there's. There's something. Is this a message about why women are missing from the film or what. What role women would be playing in their lives if they had women? Or. I don't know, it's.

41:01 Wes: Would their flat be cleaner if they had girlfriends?

41:04 Erin: Yes, of course. Yeah. I mean, and they would be. And not only because the women are cleaning up after them, but because they would have to. They would, yes, clean up for the sake of the women. Right?

41:13 Wes: They would. They would have to.

41:14 Erin: So, yeah, so there's something. He's not thinking about women his own. Even Danny, right, isn't thinking about women his own age. He's thinking about these little Girls and giving them dolls almost in the interest of training them to grow up to clean after people like that, you know what I mean? Like, there's a strange hole at the center of the film where age appropriate women should be. And everything is geared in one to one extreme or the other. Children or elderly people, or people at least like Monty, a generation older than they are. So in other words, Dany is a sage, but he's also just as stunted as Marwood and Withnail in certain ways.

41:53 Wes: Don't get me wrong, Robinson based him on a hairdresser that he thought of as a complete idiot.

41:58 Erin: Yeah. No, I love Danny.

42:01 Wes: I mean, he's such a great character, but even the way he speaks supposedly is. Right. That's Robinson's direction to the actor who plays Danny to emulate that speech. Exactly. And the slowness of it and the accent and everything.

42:15 Erin: Well, he manages a lot of syllables.

42:18 Wes: Yeah. Seems like it became sort of a trope. Right. I've seen this character now many times in movies, Right. The idiot sage drug addict who's somehow precise and knowledgeable and yet drug addled and idiotic at the same time.

42:39 Erin: I was thinking of this even with Monty, his speech about being a boy and on the tandem bike with his little school chum. I was thinking that. Oh, the character of Gil Chesterton, I think is his name in Frasier. The gourmand who has the cooking or the restaurant review show. And he's always talking about romping with his school chums in Surrey or whatever.

43:02 Wes: Oh, that's funny.

43:03 Erin: That character probably was. You know, couldn't exist without Monty.

43:08 Wes: Well, let's talk about Monty for the second half.

43:11 Erin: Sure.

43:12 Wes: For the first part of the second half. And then you. I think we could use him as a segue into this theme that I raised about city, you know, the urban versus the rural and the romance of going into the countryside and the way that doesn't actually pan out for them. So, yeah, we'll talk about in part two. So we've reached the end of part one. patreon.com subtextpodcast or directly on Apple. If not, you can wait a week for part two. All right, thank you.

43:52 Erin: Thank you.

Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.

Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography. We're covering In Plato's Cave and America Seen Through Photographs Darkly, which I've been bringing in a little bit primarily, but we've just been talking about In Plato's Cave. And I want to continue talking about the implied ethics, I want to call it, of Sontag's critique of photography by speaking of the ways in which photographs inure us. I think Sontag is very subtly setting up a shadow of that in which she's implying that there might be a different relationship to photography which we could somehow inculcate in ourselves. I wonder if we can use this essay, in other words, to spin out some theories about what Sontag would say is a more ethical relationship to the photographic image. I think there's a suggestion in a couple of places what that might be. Well, she has this idea, as we've already covered, that there is something aggressive and therefore imperialistic about photography, and also that it flattens and democratizes the world at the same time. And therefore, in a strange sort of way, I think her middle Ground, or what she might be very subtly advocating for, is a kind of aristocracy of images. A word which I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable using. And I don't want to put words in her mouth, but a curation of images which suggests a kind of hierarchical relationship. So the place that I'm getting this. And you'll tell me if I'm crazy for drawing this conclusion, but the place that I'm getting this is when she talks about. Photographs are themselves packaged. They're a way of packaging the world, and they somehow invite packaging. And then she talks about a photograph working well in a book. Because unlike a painting, which is not smooth and not printed out, a photograph already is smooth and printed. So when it's reproduced in a book, it keeps much of its essential quality. And she says, but still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme. For putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging and enlarging still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed. And there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. So that's where. That's where I'm getting this curation scheme from. You have a bunch of photographs in a book. You might open it up and flip through, and you're almost, you know, your eyes are kind of glazing over. You're not really looking at anything. You're not giving an equal amount of time to distinct images. And so she's implying that when photographs are in a film in which each photograph is given a set amount of time by some. Some director or some curator of these images who's forcing you to look at just say one photo for 15 seconds and then the next photo for 20 seconds. That this creates a different kind of relationship to the image and the person who is making this film. Curating this selection, determining the order, determining the amount of time allotted to each individual photograph is doing you a service, it seems. That's kind of what she's implying about this Chris Marker film, in which there's an imposed order. And she says, as a result, a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. So to me, that implies that there is a better way to consume images. And that is by having someone who presumably knows More than we do curating that experience of images. For us, there might be some sort of curatorial relationship which is better than our current democratized, willy nilly relationship with images. Do you see where I'm getting this aristocratic.

4:24 Wes: Yeah. So there's not a lot in this essay that's positive. You know, we'll get to the way it concludes in a second. Which seems pretty globally negative. I mean, right? There are hints of the positive when she says, for instance, that after looking at Holocaust photos, I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten. Something went dead, something is still crying. So that's actually just a mixed picture right there. Grief, I think, would be a positive effect and would serve the ethical. Right. So one question is, to what extent can photography serve the political and the ethical? To what extent can it arouse conscience? And then to what extent does it arouse all these other feelings, like manic defenses in the sense of possessing the world and that other stuff? And the point that you're focusing on, which I think is early on in the essay. Right. Gets at the fact that a more curated relationship to images could have a more positive effect. And then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what kinds of effects are we thinking of? Are we thinking of the aesthetic, the moral, the political? Do we need them to be sequenced for us and into film form? Or is it enough to be in a museum and to have photographs by great artists? Of course, she's going to have quite an interesting critique of Diane Arbus in the next essay, and I've only read the first two essays of this book. So given that you've read the whole book, is there a more expansive, positive picture that she gives for photography?

6:02 Erin: Okay, no. And I think that's why I'm interested in trying to find the flip side of this critique. It might be that it simply just opens up a whole other can of worms, like who gets to curate? Who decides? Is it simply that there is some aristocracy of artists implied by this, say, this film director who's curated these images and set times for them? She finds this effective. So is it that artists are the ones who can curate these for us? Well, not really, because then she also has Arbus as an artist photographer. She's selecting subjects and choosing what to photograph. And Sontag has problems, as do I, with some of those selections. So I've set a sort of impossible task for us, which is to try and figure out what Sontag might have said or might be saying in some sort of shadow, of this essay, about what a positive relationship to photographs might be. Yeah, so it's all speculative, but there is an idea of refusal as well, of refusal of looking or a refusal to inure ourselves, which seems implicit in the. At the end of Plato's Cave and the discussion of understanding, the way the

7:14 Wes: essay wraps up, which is actually quite negative. She makes a few different negative points about photography. One is so on my page 16, she'll say the ethical content of photographs is fragile. And they're fragile because the pathos of pastness kind of swallows them up. She'll say the particular qualities and intentions of the photographs tend to be swallowed up in the general pathos of time past. So whether it's a photograph from 1900 that might have had some emotional effect back then to us, just might look old timey. And the old timeiness of it is more interesting to us than whatever pathos is there in the subject matter of the picture. And then she gets into the sort of incorporation of photography into institutions of control, like with the police, for instance, or bureaucracy. We photograph, we have to have a photographic id. And despite all that, she'll say there's an informational value to pictures in those bureaucratic contexts. But for most people, she'll say the informational value of pictures is on the same order as that of fiction. And she compares a tabloid like the Daily News to Lamond, which runs no photographs. And the suggestion here is that by giving us pictures, the tabloid, in fact is farther away from truth than just the written word. And I think there's something to that. So that's what I take as the first of a kind of one, two punch at the end of the essay, a negative view of things. And then the other is more generally about photography fragmenting the world and getting at, I think, what you were. You just mentioned, which is the kind of foreclosure of genuine understanding because it makes the world seem more available than it actually is. We give ourselves the illusion of knowing things by way of the camera, the photograph. But we're denying the depth behind that surface. And so for that reason, I think she says, this is page 18 in my book. Basically, they can never give us political or ethical knowledge. So while it can goad conscience, it can finally never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. You know, there's a little bit of positive light here, the idea that it can goad conscience, for instance, in certain contexts. And we're also not, you know, we're not hearing about film, you know, except for that part that you noted about putting still photos in sequence in a film. Is film better? I don't know.

10:06 Erin: I think it is. I think it is. She does call television a stream of under selected images, right? Each one canceling out the one before or something like that. And so that under selection seems to kind of exonerate it in a way and also make it less interesting. I should say that I think there could be more positive. I read the first four in the book for the purposes of the podcast. I've in the past read the whole book, so I could be just not remembering a more positive. She does say in one of the essays, for instance, I remember that photographs don't teach us about surprising things that are ugly. You know, they don't surprise us really with ugliness, but they can surprise us with beauty. So that they could be a way to find more in the world, which is surprisingly beautiful. So that would be an example of something I could think of which is a positive statement about photography. But for the most part, the relentless criticism. And she's someone who enjoyed film, and film has a bunch of implications which make it fall outside of the critiques that she levies against photographs. Like just the mere fact that if it's a. If it's a film with a plot, it's not purporting to be an image of something real or of something that really happened. I mean, it is insofar as those actors really were all standing together in a room. Maybe not anymore, but it used to be evidence that they were all standing together in a room. But I think it has just a vastly different set of moral qualities about it. But she says only that which narrates can make us understand and that we need narrative. Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no, Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph. And then later in the paragraph, only that which narrates can make us understand. So this. This very idea that we need narration is, I think, what I'm getting at here when I'm describing that she's implicitly making this argument that aristocracy is some kind of middle road. That can help, because I think that's. That's the implication of needing a narrative who is only that which narrates can make us understand. Well, what is going to narrate to us, what narration are we going to receive? Who is going to be the one who narrates? That's very opaque to me. But it seems we do need a narrator. There are people who by implication here are in some sort of privileged position to be able to narrate these images to us.

12:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important. So in a way, we need a point of view. And the photograph might give us the idea that we have a view from nowhere, in a sense, but also because it can't give us all the context and it can't give us a narrative and it's outside of time in a sense. Or it doesn't cover an expanse of time. It doesn't give us the ability to fully understand, which is not by itself a problem, except that it gives us the illusion of understanding because it's. Look, there's reality.

13:09 Erin: Right, Right. And so this is where everybody is the king of their own kingdom of mental images, determining which is making up meaning from within that image world. Even though the possibility of finding meaning in a given image is entirely dependent on it being properly narrativized so that we might superimpose meanings on images which aren't really there.

13:34 Wes: She gives this great. Just around the place where you read. The camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses. In contrast to the amorous relation which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions and functioning, takes place in time and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. I hope I didn't just reread exactly the same quote. Maybe it's worth rereading twice. So that's very important. Understanding requiring an understanding of function and therefore requiring the inclusion of time and the need for narration.

14:14 Erin: And this refusal idea, which I should tip my hand a little bit more and explain that. The reason why this stuck out to me and why I suddenly wanted to think about a positive ethics of relations of our relationship to photography is that I got into a kind of argument with somebody a couple of weeks ago when I said that I didn't like to expose myself to certain images.

14:38 Wes: Why they can't see you. Just kidding.

14:42 Erin: And I was concerned about being inured to. I mean, specifically, we were talking about Game of Thrones and I just said that I really didn't. I knew about the kinds of things that are in Game of Thrones and I did. And I realized this is obviously like dwarves, we've just been taught. Yes, exactly.

14:59 Wes: That's why you can't look at Diane Arbus either.

15:02 Erin: Exactly. No, but, you know, we were talking about that show, and I said, oh, you know, it seems like it would be a really interesting show to watch, and I just can't. I'm really hypersensitive to this. Like, I've tried to basically maintain my sensitivity by not exposing myself to certain images because I do not want to desensitize myself. And this person thought that in doing so, I was coddling myself, essentially, and that I had a fundamentally immature relationship to the subject matter by not seeing these things, which I really disagreed with. And I. You know, all of that came back again. Somehow the Sontag came up at this interesting time where I had just had that conversation, and I thought, well, what she's really advocating for here is something similar to what I was arguing, which is a kind of hygiene of vision. Her idea seems to be that the worst thing we could do is not intervene in a situation which requires our intervention. So having a camera in our hand, I think, for Sontag, can be problematic in that there might be a situation which needs our help or our intervention. And by holding a camera, we might not be able to intervene and help someone. We might simply be in a voyeuristic relationship to, say, a mugging. I don't know. So we should be in a position where we are able to help the person being mugged instead of just standing there going, oh, this is great. I'm capturing a mugging live on my iPhone, you know, and I'm going to broadcast it to my followers. So I think that what Sontag is saying is that we need to be able to intervene, and that is what is negative about having a camera. And that part of our ability to intervene or to even recognize that something that is happening is wrong or bad or whatever ugly or something is not being inured to those occurrences by simply being inundated with lots of examples of that so that we are no longer able to even determine that, you know, this is a very extreme example, but we're not even able to determine that a mugging is bad, right. So that we can't even intervene in the mugging because we don't think it's particularly bad, because, well, we're inundated with images of muggings every day, so it's a normal thing. So we might as well just photograph it instead of intervening in some way. Again, that's a silly and sort of extreme example that I'm using just to illustrate what I think her point is. So something about, I think, not desensitizing ourselves seems to be important to Sontag, so that we maintain our sensitivity to things which deserve that sensitivity, so that we can be properly morally outraged when confronted with real moral outrages, and so that we can intervene when a situation needs our intervention. I think that is ultimately what she's saying, must be preserved from the jaws of photography. But that may not be accurate and I may simply be interpreting this so as to win the mental argument that I'm still having with this person. Right. Well, I think, I mean, I think

18:09 Wes: clearly she's, you know, she's pointing to this double edged sword of the. There's the capacity of photography to arouse the conscience and then. But it can also inure us, as you're pointing out, and she points out, but. And it does that in the same way it shocks us. But then if we get shocked enough times, we can be inured. And then. So the question is, do I avoid all exposure? Do I try to titrate it? Do I try to get just the right amount of exposure? Or do I atrocity. Do atrocity porn all day? This is kind of a dilemma with the news, right?

18:48 Erin: Yes, exactly.

18:49 Wes: And it doesn't need to be photographic. I think, unfortunately, even when there's narrative, in the case of the news, it can be bad for us. So I kind of have a compromise where I look at it a little bit, but then I try not to linger over it anymore just because it's not because I have self discipline, but just because it's gotten so depressing. But it frees up a lot of time. So I want to maintain some awareness, but I don't want to harm myself by doing that. I don't want to just have my head in the sand. But on the other hand, I want to protect myself.

19:19 Erin: Just to bring in the essay here, she says to suffer is one thing. Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. And that's really important is, I think for her is to strengthen that conscience and the ability to be compassionate, to be able to act, to be able to intervene. It can also. This is Sontag again. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more images. Transfix images anesthetize an event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs. Think of the Vietnam War. But after repeated exposure to images, it also becomes less real. And I think that is a problem. She Goes on to talk about pornography and the anesthetizing that. That happens when we. When the shock of pornography wears off. And then she says in these last decades, quote, unquote, concerned photography, that is, you know, photography which is designed to arouse our ethical function by showing us atrocities that we should be outraged by. Concerned photography has done at least as to deaden conscience as to arouse it. Yeah. So again, this sends me into, you know, this, this question of, okay, then, what is the proper amount? What is a proper comportment to images? Which sends me down that sort of aristocratic rabbit hole. Who's going to be responsible for determining what is the correct amount of exposure by the masses to these images? To a certain extent, it's. It is media corporations.

20:53 Wes: It's not going to be the sovereign. Plato and Plato's Republic. I was thinking about the argument between Plato and Aristotle earlier when you're talking about Game of Thrones, because the Platonic argument is that you could be corrupted by identifying with the person or the God doing the immoral thing. You get infected with their passions and your soul can be. Your character can be corrupted by it. And I think there's a point to that. And then the Aristotelian argument is actually. No, there's a cathartic effect. I can identify with characters, even characters doing crazy, violent things without necessarily being contaminated by them. There's a more complicated psychological relationship. I think they're both right to some extent.

21:36 Erin: Well, I think that's about the narrative element of Game of Thrones, whereas I'm concerned more with what Sontag is talking about here. I don't want those images in my head.

21:44 Wes: Yeah, well, that's a good distinction. Yeah, that's an important distinction. I was going to add to that. I do think the. It's an important point that they're talking about ancient Greek plays. Right. So there's an important visual part of this, including the masks. But leaving that aside, I think narrative is a problem too. And this came up in one of my first subtext episodes, which you were not on, but it about Slaughterhouse 5. And there's a worry in that novel about can you write about any of this without actually sensationalizing it or glorifying it in some way? Can you do that with war? Because war is exciting. And so even for narration, I think it becomes a problem or remains a problem, let's put it that way. I think narration helps. Well, let me give another example. When I was an animal healthcare reporter, worked for the Animal Healthcare magazine, I wrote a very Positive. I'm sure I've told this story before, but I wrote a very positive profile of someone who started one of the first animal cruelty sections within a police department. Yeah. She wasn't happy with the profile because it was fictionalized. Not because I put in any wrong facts, but just because I created a narrative. I created a story out of it, tried to make it interesting to an audience. And that by itself, even if everything is. We fact checked. We had a fact checker calling people. That by itself is distorting. That's kind of why I said you need a point of view. You need someone to be an essayist. I think in the end, whether they're doing that with photographs or with words or with a documentary. And that's the other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about sequencing in time. And you can write. Documentaries will include photographic stills often, and then contextual narrative around it. Think of something like Ken Burns, and then you have the right music, you got it all.

23:33 Erin: Great actors to read out letters.

23:36 Wes: Good voice, good narrators. Such good voices. The problem she's identifying doesn't go away. There's something better about the idea that one is involved in an essay. One is involved in making a point or having a point of view. And that it's not just a view from nowhere. I take a picture of my cat. Yep, that's my cat. She really exists. That's objective reality. But if I take a picture of her posing. Because she's also a model supermodel and she likes to pose. Yeah, that's an opinion. I mean, it's not an opinion that she's a supermodel. That's a fact. Or that she's beautiful. But it's. The particular posing in the photograph is an opinion. And that's a segue to chapter two, America Seen Through Photographs Darkly. Because it. Or to the second essay. Sorry, because it. Right. Part of the point is that Arbus is. She's got an agenda. She's got a certain opinion. And it's a kind of leveling thing where everything is made grotesque, whether it's actual freaks or just suburban nights. And this kind of condescending attitude towards suburban nights is something you interestingly see in contemporary streaming shows. Isn't it quaint that people are so normal? Aren't they cute?

24:55 Erin: Yes, that's right.

24:57 Wes: But it starts from. And I mean, it's such a great essay, but it starts from this. She traces it back to kind of. To Walt Whitman's idea of a democratic embrace of all experience, where I Think the point is to lift up ordinary life and say, oh, isn't everything majestic in some sense? Or isn't everything a manifestation of God or whatever? So it's in the same tradition, but it's actually leveling down rather than leveling up. But at least we know there's curation to that. But at least we understand, even if we don't like that project, that we're engaged with someone who is engaged in that kind of what you'll call surrealist project. For depicting America as a surrealist nation.

25:42 Erin: The hyper selection of Arbus work really suggests a distinct point of view, much like the HBO imperative to deliberately show things as disgusting as they could possibly be for the purposes of titillation. But they I was most interested in. In her analysis of Arbus character, she ultimately ascribes a naivete which is both coy and sinister. She says in the photograph's acceptance of the appalling. This is at the paragraph beginning. The most striking aspect of Arbus's work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises, concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate, but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. She talks about Arbus's aggressiveness toward the public, which has been treated as a moral accomplishment. This is just a fabulous essay. I love this essay. I think this is the best thing ever written about Arbus, who, if she did bother you before, will certainly bother you after you read this. Yeah. So the naivete of these photographs, Sontag says, is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other. Sontag says that there's a deliberate desire on Arbus part to inure us, to deaden our response to this kind of thing or to show us things that are shocking. And then the comportment that we have, say, in the art gallery, I mean, you know, we can imagine being people in the early 60s encountering this in a gallery. We're supposed to not be horrified by this or not show that we're horrified by this. Right. We're supposed to actually affect total nonchalance in the face of some very disturbing

27:32 Wes: images like that nudist camp woman with the apron. Yes, yes, topless, but except for an apron, because you don't want to spill coffee on yourself. You want to get coffee all over your thighs. I don't know.

27:48 Erin: Right.

27:49 Wes: There's times when clothing is just necessary. Okay, maybe not stay warm, but she

27:55 Erin: calls this a Self willed test of hardness, both on the part of Arbus and I suppose on the part of the people who look at Arbus photographs. And that ultimately the intent that people like Arbus have in going out and collecting these images of pain is not to feel more, but to feel less. And that too seems to be part of an inherent part of Sontag's say, moral vision, such as we can piece it together in these two essays, which is that we should be trying to feel more, not less. So I would say that this deadening is for Sontag a very negative thing, that we should be trying to preserve some kind of sensitivity. And because she says here, here, here is the key, it works out not as a liberation of, but as a subtraction from the self. A pseudo familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life. I think that's as much kind of the moral key for Sontag as any sentence in here. So that subtraction from the self is what happens, I think, when she's saying, when we expose ourselves to these deadening images, we actually have less self as a result of this. In a way, it's what you're describing with the belief that being photographed takes away part of your soul or something like that. This is Sontag's transmogrification of that idea.

29:16 Wes: There's a part just for the one that you're focusing in on, where she talked about. Whitman preached empathy, concord and discord, oneness and diversity, psychic intercourse with everything, everybody plus sensual union. When he could get it is the giddy trip that is proposed explicitly over and over again in the prefaces of the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also dictated his poetry's form and tone. Whitman's poems are a psychic technology for chanting the reader into a new state of being and then a little lower, meant to get readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to the height where they can identify with the past and with the community of American desire. But this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now. So yeah, with Whitman you get this impetus to merger in a way with the past and with others, this impulse to oneness. And that's precisely what you're not getting with Arbus. The monsters that she's photographing are not inviting you to identify with them. Right, Since a lot of them are ugly. People can go look at her, her photography, but it's basically like trying to create a freak show out of everything, even out of maybe a normal couple standing there, depending on the way things are framed. So there's a kind of anti humanist message here, according to Sontag.

30:48 Erin: Yes. And Arbus doesn't want you to feel distance from that, though that's what's really interesting. Is this not. What was the word you used with Whitman?

30:58 Wes: Identification or merging?

31:00 Erin: Identification or merger. You're not supposed to feel that identification at all. But what's aggressive Sontag is saying about the photos is that she doesn't allow you to feel any distance from them. So it's like you're in close quarters with the other. And it's designed to make you feel this intense discomfort for that closeness and for the way in which these people are being photographed. And yet that feeling, that otherness, very intensely is part of it. So it's a sort of anti merger. You're put up close and it's designed to induce this reaction of discomfort, embarrassment, pain, shock, all of these things, which words which I think Sontag uses to characterize the experience of being in contact with these images. The most interesting observation, I think for me in the whole essay is when Sontag says that Arbus's interest in freaks. This is on page 43 in my Picador edition. Arbus's interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged to vent her frustration at being safe. I love that. That's. I think that's really key. I think a lot of people are reacting against safety by trying to, say, manufacture instances in which they remain safe but which feel unsafe to try and shock themselves into some. What they perceive as being some sort of more authentic relationship with the world. Anyway, I found that to be incredibly insightful and fascinating and it was somehow recognizable to me. It's psychologically revealing about Arbus, but it also reveals something about maybe what we might call the false promise of photography, which is to give us a sense that we've experienced something outside of our comfort zone in a way which is prepackaged and which doesn't actually come with any of the attendant, say, moral lessons that real experience might provide. Do you know what I'm saying? So there's something, I think illustrative about all of our relationship with photography in the character analysis she does of Arbus in this moment. Though it's also very specific and interestingly revealing about Arbus particular character.

33:12 Wes: Yeah, she says that the photographs in a way are too cool for school. It's like the compassionate response to them is supposed to be irrelevant. We're not supposed to feel horrified. Right. When we look at the Pictures, we're too cool for that kind of thing. And one might see that as a kind of way to destigmatize and to level experience and say, well, nothing is really freaky or everything is really freaky. But I think she sees it as a kind of unsavory inurement to reality. Right?

33:42 Erin: Yeah.

33:42 Wes: She contrasts Arbus kind of middle class or privileged, maybe upper middle class, yes, quite privileged Jewish existence and this enhanced desire to seek out a kind of corrective for that, to seek out some sort of adversity and violate her own incidents, sorry, innocence and you know, overcome the sense of being privileged.

34:08 Erin: I think everybody is suffering from this to a certain extent in the modern era because we don't actually have enough friction in our lives. And I think we feel the lack of what we might call experiences that are meaning making or character building because we're not suffering in the ways that previous generations have suffered. I mean people are certainly, they're suffering in different ways, but ways which are maybe less legible to us than what we're used to or what we think of in our minds as being acceptable or historically ways in which we might develop ourselves. And I think people feel the lack of that and they try to create those almost like self impose that suffering through a variety of other means. And so I think that is a little bit of what Sontag is getting at here. This is the way that Arbus is trying to do it by taking these close up shots with, with these people who look freaky and forcing us to look at it and be uncomfortable. And then we're supposed to just sort of look at it and act very nonchalant. And I remember being in a, I remember being in a museum with a, with a friend of mine from college who had none of the, I guess, training and nonchalance that people usually get at some point than going to museums or just, I don't know, learning, learning some sort of disaffected behavior from the people around them. And so we went into some modern art exhibit. I don't even remember what it was, but I just remember her going, oh my God, you know, like, like really loudly having these reactions and calling a lot of attention to herself. And now of course reading this, I'm like, of course, you know, she was actually doing the exact right thing. And probably Sontag would approve of that reaction because it's proof that she hadn't been anesthetized. She's actually having a real authentic reaction rather than a put on of, mmm, yeah, you're looking at something horrifying and you're supposed to just shrug your shoulders and walk on to the next image and brush it off. I think to a certain extent Sontag is saying we should maybe refuse to do that or we should recognize the falseness in doing that at least.

36:12 Wes: Yeah, there's a cynicism to it. And this maybe we can give listeners away taste of the way she ends the essay. Bringing it back to Whitman and making equivalences between freaks, mad people, suburban couples and nudists is a very powerful judgment, one in complicity with a recognizable political mood shared by many educated left liberal Americans. The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different, Whitman's democratic vista. Everybody is shown to look the same. Succeeding the more buoyant hopes for America has come. A bitter, sad embrace of experience. There's a particular melancholy in the American Photographic project, but the melancholy was already latent in the heyday of Whitman esque affirmation, including Stieglitz. So I'm skipping a little bit. So the Whitman esque appetites have turned pious. The photographer now patronizes reality photographers with less ego and magnetism. The Stiglitz gradually gave up the struggle. They might continue to practice atomistic visual stenography. The atomistic visual stenography inspired by Whitman, but without Whitman's delirious powers of synthesis. What they documented was discontinuity, detritus, loneliness, greed, sterility. So it ends in a way on the same note as the last essay with this movement towards atomism. Right. We started out with Whitman's leveling, being about a movement towards unity. And this is still a leveling, but it's more about we all end up the same level as our own little freaky disconnected atoms, rather than being somehow ennobled together.

38:03 Erin: I mean, it just gets worse from here. Right. There's no stopping this train. So maybe I've been wrong all along to look for some sort of alternative or instructions for a solution.

38:17 Wes: America has been discovered as the quintessential surrealist country. That's the one that I wanted to get to. This idea of succumbing to surrealism.

38:28 Erin: Yeah.

38:28 Wes: So quite pessimistic. And it sounds like from what, you know, the rest of the book, there's not much optimism.

38:36 Erin: Well, I mean, yeah. Though I don't want to give listeners the impression that these aren't exhilarating and really fun essays to read.

38:43 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think you're doing well as a country if you have a writer like this. Yeah, she's amazing. So. Yeah, that's why I talked about a point of view in the essay. In the end, this is an argument for being a great essayist as opposed to a stenographer. And photography lends itself to stenography.

39:05 Erin: Right.

39:05 Wes: All right. Any last words before we put America to bed? No.

39:10 Erin: No. I love that. Sontag herself is the solution. That's music to my ears.

39:18 Wes: All right. Thank you.

39:20 Erin: Thank. You.

Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.

Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:12 Erin: Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof, but can't, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which paradoxically atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile world in his or her head. Today we're discussing two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography in Plato's Cave and Seen Through Photographs Darkly, and asking what constitutes photography's ethics of seeing and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image. This is Erin Olonek. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just coincidentally, I've been printing out tons of photographs over the last few days of my sister at various stages of her life because I'm the maid of honor for her wedding and I'm throwing her bridal shower. So, you know, we had decided to cover these essays. And then just over the last couple days, I happened to be looking through old family photo albums anyway, so it's been a strange thing to read these essays in tandem with that. And I've been thinking about how attached I am. I wouldn't say that I take a lot of photos, but I love photos. I love photos of family. I have photos everywhere, and various apartments I've lived in have always been covered in photos. I just wonder what your relationship is. You don't strike me as someone who takes a lot of photos either. Do you have a lot of photo albums? Are there certain photos that you love looking at? Do you have attachments to photos?

2:10 Wes: I do have some photo albums and I used to curate those much more actively when I was in my 20s and maybe 30s, but because it's become much less common to actually, you know, there was a time when you had to take your disposable camera to the. To the pharmacy and have them do their magic. And you.

2:32 Erin: I'm going to the pharmacy after this to pick up. Oh, really? Yeah, because I'm making displays which are for the bridal shower, so I have to go pick up prints from CVS for the first time in years. Just later this afternoon.

2:48 Wes: Amazing. That's the.

2:49 Erin: The coincidences that. Bizarre.

2:51 Wes: Yeah. You know, and then you'd have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, and it was. But sad to say, I think the. What do you even call them? What's the thing? You keep your photos in the binder. Those are in storage. And I've digitized everything. I digitized everything. And I digitized a bunch of my mom's photos that she had kind of lying around because I wanted some of those. But she would always. She's always worried about me taking her photos. You know, like, it was always a thing with my mom and me. Like, she accused me of stealing her books, which I. Which I did, and taking the taking as a kid, you know, like taking her books out of her room and putting them in my room or out of the living room and just putting them on the shelves in my room. But anyway, yeah, now I have a digital collection, and I can't say that I spend a lot of time looking at that, except for pictures of my cat. Those are like the main pictures that I take if I go on a vacation. So recently I was in Tucson and went up to Mount Lemmon and did various things. So I'll take a few photos. How do I put this? I don't take a lot. I don't like the way it. It's, you know, for reasons that Sontag talks about, the way it interrupts the experience, or it feels like I'm trying to behave in an acquisitive way towards the experience or commodify it. And also, I don't know what the point is exactly. I mean, you see people taking so many photos. It's like, how would you ever have the time in your life to go back and look at all the photos that you're taking? No one's going to even have the time. It goes into the cloud, the cloud storage, and that's it. And it's reassuring to know that it exists there. So you have that you could go back to it, but she probably won't.

4:39 Erin: It occurred to me that a lot of what Sontag covers in the essays is just even more apparent now with the iPhone. And so a lot of this seems to me to be super relevant. But one of the phenomena that I've been talking about with a friend of mine in relation to this. Yeah, just these thousands and thousands of images that live on our phones or on our computers is, I think, this further, I don't know, democratization of experience that she's talking about, which is, you know, how you go into. Into iphotos and it'll show you. Well, first of all, everything is organized by date. There are maps, too. Like, you could look at the map of the world and see the photos that you've taken in different locations. But specifically this on this date function where it will show you what you were doing on the same day a year ago, five years ago, whatever. And Facebook does this too, right? With Facebook memories, which I was obsessed with for a while, probably around the time that it first rolled out or when I first noticed it, which might have been a long time afterwards. And it had this curious effect, specifically the days in which it would. There was nothing that you had posted on that day in all the years that you've had Facebook, if you, if you know it's today is March 2nd, if there was nothing that you ever did on March 2nd that you posted on Facebook about it would tell you you have no memories on this day, which I thought was, you know, chilling. And it would. It almost spurs you to want to. I mean, it doesn't for me, but it would spur you to want, know what you were doing on that day or to post something so that next year, on March 2, you would have something that, you know, some evidence that you existed on that day. But in, in relation to this, this democratization, it's as if all of these photo apps now want every day to be like an anniversary or a birthday. Every day becomes a significant day. So insofar as every experience a photograph, as Sontag says, becomes flattened. Everyone who's. Who's photographed is a celebrity and therefore everyone is a celebrity and therefore nobody's a celebrity. This tying it to a date so that you might be, you know, 50 years ago. You might be photographed every, every year on your birthday and every year at school picture day or something like that. And other than that, maybe you don't have. And graduation, maybe you don't have very many everyday photos of your life now. It's as though every day of the year is some kind of big event. And if you don't have a photograph from that specific date, there's this black hole in your photographic record. The attempt to capture everything in your life and therefore give meaning to every moment of your life. And obviously the flip side of that is taking away meaning in every moment of your life. That creep, it just seems to get more and more like, I wonder what the next step is beyond that. Once, once every day has become an anniversary, you know, is it going to show you what you were doing hour by hour, minute by minute, where you were what. When you go places, will it ping on your phone? Your past photographs from that particular street corner, Starbucks, hotel, me get pen, I

7:42 Wes: need to write these ideas down, because I can get AI to Vibe code this for me.

7:49 Erin: I don't know what the point of any of this is, just that, yeah, I was really interested in this idea of an imperializing democracy that Sontag pinpoints. And that's kind of the. Where I wanted to begin. But I'm going about it in a very weird way.

8:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. A kind of leveling that between experiences that becomes overpowering or subjects us. Is that the idea?

8:12 Erin: Yeah. She makes the point very subtly. She says on page seven, this is in Plato's cave. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning, to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. It's a bit of a stretch, but I just noted the proximity in the paragraph. I mean, they're a sentence apart from each other. Imperial and democratize. So the sense that it's a. It's that photography is attempting to colonize the whole world. But what it's doing really is setting up the pseudo world of images which stands in parallel to the actual world. Everything in the world is captured in individual photographs. So everything is atomized, it's democratized because anything photographed becomes equivalent to anything else that is photographed. And then there's also this democracy where we're all imperial rulers over. Over the image world that we've constructed in our own heads that gives us the impression that we own it or that we understand it or that we can see it and kind of map it in our own heads, whether we've been to these places or not. And that that's somehow given to everybody. So we're all emperors over our own internal image worlds. And the equality of that is the democratic part, I suppose. I think something like really complex is happening in the. In her use of those two terms side by side.

9:51 Wes: Right. There's a sense in which photographs become an aid to memory. And they can also become a replacement for memory. And that's part of the problem. So the minute that you're taking a snapshot of something on a vacation, it takes you out of the experience because, again, it gives you the sense that you've acquired it. And I've put it in my little box. My little. It's like taking a note now. I don't have to, really. If I don't have to rely on memory, then why let myself be as immersed in the experience as I might otherwise? Let myself be. Because that's on the record. Something like that. But here, at the point that you were quoting her, she had just talked about how despite the fact that photographs are used as evidence and they can incriminate and they can justify and they suggest that something exists, there's always the selection. Selection becomes a kind of interpretation. We decide what we're going to photograph and when we're going to photograph them and how. And eventually, as we get into the other essay, how people are going to pose and all of that stuff. So she mentions taking shots of sharecroppers in a way that'll express their poverty and dignity, for instance. But the other aspect here, I think that you're getting at is the kind of aggression that's paradoxically involved in passivity and ubiquity. So maybe just to read. We'll give people an idea, since she's such a fabulous essayist. I'll just read it. Images which idealize, like most fashion and animal photography, are no less aggressive than work, which makes a virtue of plainness. Like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sword and mugshots, there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as it is in all the succeeding decades during which technology made possible an ever increasing speed of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Juliet Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron, who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. I think you already read this. Right from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent photography in photography from its very beginning. To democratize all experiences by translating them into images. So it's there. Interestingly, the kind of thing that the advance of technology makes possible, I think she thinks is already there from the very beginning, this democratization of experience. But it really accelerates it. And then we get into the ubiquity of it with everyone has a pocket camera, and little did she know that real it would all just be in the phone. You'd sound like a crazy person if you said that around this time. And everyone would just have phones in their pockets that were also cameras.

13:04 Erin: I guess another way of putting this is to say that photography is an aggressive imperialistic enforcement of a democratic relationship to the world, which is to say a sort of enforced equality or flattening. That paragraph, I think, is the most interesting in an essay full of just the most brilliant paragraphs.

13:27 Wes: Agreed.

13:28 Erin: In response to what you said about. About photographs becoming a replacement of memory, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that's even more true now. I mean, I think it's true in a way that Sontag never could have anticipated. I mean, she's. She's already sort of hinting at it, of course, But I do think that there's something almost quaint now, or in fact, quite quaint about actual physical photo albums. She talks about the elegiac quality of photos and photos being a memento mori, which I think is a little bit different from being an aide to memory. You know, so you look back through a photo album and it might trigger a memory of a certain day or even how you were feeling in that moment, but really, it seems designed for pathos. And as she talks about capturing somebody at a moment which is now past or now dead or an earlier version of that person. Right. And I think now what we have is maybe rather than walking around with these image worlds in our head, these facsimiles of the world in our head, as she's suggesting, photographs supply us with. Really, we're walking around with these facsimiles of the world in our phones, and we've exported this external hard drive. We've exported all of our memories to this object as well, so that we don't have to hold onto the memories in our heads, even in the way that Sontag is describing in the essay. You know, we've sort of gone beyond this and all of our function when it comes to recalling something. Like, it could be triggered by seeing photos in the phone. But primarily we're exporting that memory to the phone, and it's containing much vaster quantities of photos than an album could hold. So it does become like memory, like an external hard drive for our memories.

15:17 Wes: Because of that, we sort of interfere with memory. I think part of the thing is memory implies loss, right? Because the thing is no longer around and because the memory of it is going to fade. And because a memory is more than the visual experience, right? There's also the emotions involved. And you're on a family trip and people are annoying you and maybe you're bored or have to go to the bathroom. There's a lot of other stuff outside of the picture of you looking happy in front of the mountain or whatever it is. So there is a kind of manic quality, or what I would call a manic defense quality to photography. Naturally, it's a defense against loss with actual memory. Loss is just a part of it. And that's kind of the way she begins her book, right. Talking about how photography redefines our relationship to the real world in these very. In terms of acquisition, we have the photographs on our external hard drive, on our phone. It's like appropriation, the idea that for some societies, being photographed might steal one's soul. Well, I kind of think we act as if we're sucking the soul of the world into the phone or into the camera to keep it with us. And then, of course, we can manipulate. I mean, she talks about blowing up and retouching photographs, you know, and we don't even. We don't even do that anymore, but we can put them into digital folders or put them on social media and do all sorts of other virtual types of manipulation with them. And since the time when she wrote this essay, that the ability to share these photographs, that was enhanced incredibly by social media and Facebook and things like that. And it used to be fun. Facebook used to be fun. I don't know if people remember that now. It's just something that I. And most people I know just avoid unless they have to do something on it for some reason. And why is that? I don't know exactly beyond politics or beyond envy of seeing people live their shiny lives on Facebook with the vacations. I don't know what it is, but it became. Something went sour with that. And part of it, I guess, is just the getting sucked into this activity of putting one's life on blast or advertising your life to other people and trying to get them to see you and them trying to get you to see them. I don't know what it is, but anyway, I kind of digress there. Really what I was trying to get at was the manic quality of this and the idea that there's some kind of power and control and acquisition in taking photos. And even the fact that you can kind of make time stand still, as she points out. You just get a slice of time. There's an element of incredible power in

18:21 Erin: all that, I guess, to go into the personal for a second. I sometimes forget to take photographs and wish that I had taken them. But also, I think I sometimes don't take. Want to get out the phone and start taking photographs, because for me, I've always been dissatisfied by the photos that I take because I feel as though they never really capture what I'm seeing, right. Like, I guess I'm just not a good enough photographer where I feel as though anytime I capture something and then I look at it in the phone, I'm like, oh, well, that's not really what it.

18:52 Wes: You gotta put it in portrait. Portrait mode.

18:54 Erin: Gotta put it. I know you taught me that,

18:58 Wes: but I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I know. I, That's. And that's part of my reluctance. I just know it looks so plain in the photograph, but it's so amazing, you know?

19:08 Erin: Exactly, exactly. And so then what I do is I take 45 photos of the exact same thing at slightly different tilts and then I.

19:17 Wes: You're playing paying for the cloud storage now.

19:19 Erin: Exactly. Well, no. And so then I. Well, so I have, I guess, many, many thousands fewer images than all of my friends, I think. Because then what I do is I, I don't want to take the photos because then I have to go in and choose which of the 45 I'm going to save for posterity. And I'm clicking back and forth between the one image and then the next image one inch to the left and the next image one inch to the left of that, you know, and, and so I, I think part of it is I don't take the photo because I don't want to put myself through that because I then have to edit everything and get down to the one image because I'm going, okay, I can't have 45 images of the same thing. I just have to choose. And usually it's a very arbitrary. And just say, okay, fine, this one, you know, but none of them satisfies me. None of them ever seems to me a good encapsulation of the moment. It doesn't capture the beauty, it doesn't capture the whatever. And that's simply because, you know, as she points out in the essay, it's just a slice. It's just, you know, the frame. What's being cut out really severely limits what the photograph can capture. And what. I mean, they're really. Photos are really unrealistic. It's stupid to maybe to point out something so obvious, but they're so limited and they're so unrealistic. Not only are they playing with scale as she talks about, but they're cutting out so much of what was live and real and, you know, obviously 3D and in the round about the experience that I think of them as being. I mean, I'm so grateful to have the certain photos that I do of people and obviously having Baby photos of people or photos of loved ones who are. Who are now no longer with us is. You know, it seems like photography is an incredible gift, but also I've always had this really frustrated relationship to it, probably because I'm just not a very good photographer. And they seem like strangely bad approximations of the world that they're purporting to capture. Exactly. You know, I often think that light in a painting is a much, much better illustration of light.

21:23 Wes: Yeah. They can convey the power of the scene more accurately, in a sense, bring some of the emotion. I mean, a good photograph can do some of that. But. Yeah, in general, with our snapshots, it's not going to happen as well. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. So she points to this. Most photography has nothing to do with art, and it does serve this function, according to the Sontag, of memorializing family life, for instance, including weddings. It's a very important part of big events and tourism, as we've talked about. And I think the thing that she highlights is that as the society becomes more atomized and there's more industrialization and people can travel more, this becomes a kind of desperate way to deal with that fact as community fades, as communal ties are less strong, and you begin replacing that with this kind of ritual of. Of picture taking for families. But it's not going to replace the ties that are being lost.

22:24 Erin: Yeah. That idea that photos are a kind of prosthesis of the larger family that's been lost in the reduction to the nuclear family that oftentimes all we have of those extended relations are photographs of those family members rather than those people living in the house. Say, if we were in a two or three family home or something like that.

22:46 Wes: I love this idea, too, that on vacation we might feel guilty about not being at work. Right. It gives us something to do. We have a job now. We're a photographer while we're on vacation.

22:59 Erin: Right.

23:00 Wes: But it's a way of, you know, in general of, you know, she says, refusing experience or damping down experience by using the camera, putting the camera between yourself and the experience to deal with the anxiety of that. But that includes the guilt. So she says a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it. By limiting experience to a search for the photogenic. By converting experience into an image, a super souvenir assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter this Gives shapes to experience, stop, take a photograph and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic. Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working. When they're on vacation and supposed to be having fun, they have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work. They can take pictures. I think that's very, very true.

24:03 Erin: It is.

24:04 Wes: It's hard just to stop and experience, you know, just the pause.

24:08 Erin: Yeah. I think of my grandfather when I read that, who. His photos are all over this. I'm in my grandmother's house right now. His photos are all over the walls of the house from all their many, many travels all over the world. And he was someone who retired very young, but he had this. He was never fully resting. You know, he was retired. But there was always something to do. You know, there was always work in the garden to do. There was always cooking and shopping to do and things to fix. You know, he had had his workbench downstairs and would always. I never knew what he was doing, but he was always hammering at something or putting things together. And. And so I think that that must have been, you know, the picture taking must have been a kind of version of this. You know, he's on vacation, but he still has a job to do. And there are actually pictures of him with multiple cameras around his neck for different. You know, he would have like the video camera and the different lenses and was really into that and got into that actually, when he was in the army. So I also have all of these photos of his several albums of Munich in 1945 and different buildings, which. I've always wanted to go to Germany and see if I could find the buildings that he was in. And which I have, you know, so detailed are the records that he took pictures, for instance, of street signs so you could locate the exact corner, you know, that the building was on.

25:25 Wes: Wow.

25:26 Erin: Yeah. It strikes me now is that he might have been sort of an anxious person, since a lot of this is also supposedly a defense against anxiety, which I think is. Which I think is right, too. I made a list of, across the two essays of the three sets of moral relationships and how Sontag characterizes them. The relationship between the photographer and the camera is one moral relationship that she describes which has many different characteristics. Each of these does the relationship between the photographer and the thing photograph the subject and then the relationship between people and the photographic images that they view. So the viewer and the image, all of the things that we've talked about so far, primarily that between photographer and camera. So as you described, the appearance of participation without participation, the refusal of experience, putting the camera between the self and the event to soothe, as a defense against anxiety, to relieve disorientation, the work like activity. And then we get into a couple of things that have much deeper moral implications. So the camera as a kind of a gun, as something automated, requiring no skill or expert knowledge, as she points out. And then also the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. And some of this shades into the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. But the idea that one is freed from responsibility towards those things or people or events which are photographed, that that implies a certain lack of intervention and maybe even this implicit approbation. You're saying when you take a photograph of something that you want it to keep going, which I thought was one of the most interesting elements, that. That it's encouraging something to keep happening in an implicit way. But then also there's this distance that's required. If you're going to take a photo of something, you need to be at least a little bit distant from it in order to capture it. Right. You can't be in the middle of the action. You can't be participating in something fully if you're taking a photograph of it. And you need a little bit of physical distance in order to capture something with a lens. That dichotomy is something we might dig into a little bit more.

27:30 Wes: Yeah. She makes this transition in the essay from the right. The idea that photography seems like an act of non intervention. But if you think about what's happening in say, war photography, to maintain one's position as a photojournalist, one can't get involved. I assume a war photographer would try to save someone's life if they're bleeding out in front of them. But they're certainly not picking up a gun to get involved in the fight. So she makes the point that it is. So it is still a form of participation in the sense it's a complicity with whatever makes something interesting. I think that's what you're getting at with you sort of encouraging something to keep happening by treating it as interesting. Yeah. And then I like this metaphor of the gun because there's something. I mean, she compares it to. She says that there's something perverse about picture taking. Right. And quotes Diane Arbus is saying it's a naughty thing to do, so it can intrude, it can obviously be exploitative and the fact that they're so automated increases this problem. And I was thinking, as you talked about your grandfather, there's a time when actually there's some skill and effort actually still involved. I mean, she thinks what's going on is automated, but the fact that we can just take out our phones and do it, and the phone does practically everything for you, including all these effects, and cheapens it in a way. There's an important relationship between the automation of the machine that you're using and then the target. So with a gun, right, you know, machine gun life becomes even cheaper by virtue of the fact that it's so easy to expel bullets and take out so many people at once. And likewise, people seem more possessable to the extent that you can easily take pictures of them. Right. In a way, it changes our relationship to others. She talks about it as becoming a way of turning them symbolically into objects that we possess. She says to photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed, just as the camera is. A sublimation of the gun to photograph someone is a sublimated murder, a soft murder, appropriate to sad, frightened time. Really great.

30:00 Erin: Yeah. Well, insofar as you're suggesting, and I think really accurately so that the iPhone is now more like the machine gun, I'm wondering if this idea of the photo seeing people as they never see themselves and therefore this being akin to sublimated murder, as she calls it, if the ubiquity of this kind of murder is therefore making people more impervious, or somehow people are getting acclimated to being murdered in this way. Do you know what I mean? Like people now are taking so many selfies, for instance. I mean, the selfie is. Is one thing we might really talk about this new innovation, which is of course not in the Sontag, but if we've now become akin to self murderers or if we have become impervious to this kind of murder because we're seeing ourselves as an outsider all the time. Right? That's really what that is, right? This idea that we're in a sense trapped inside our own bodies, which when I think about it too hard or for too long, I start to feel very claustrophobic that we're never going to see ourselves except through some apparatus outside of us, a mirror or reflection in some other surface or a photo. Therefore, people walking around have an access to us just through their own vision of us, which we can never have of ourselves. And the photograph, as you're saying, and as Sontag says, possesses us in that way so that the photographer bags us like they would game or something like that. But now that we could flip it around, now that we have these phones that have that function where we can view ourselves through that lens pretty regularly, and now that people take, especially like teenagers take photographs of themselves all day long. Yeah. Is that equivalent to a kind of suicide? Is that where Sontag would go with the iPhone? Or would she simply say that people have now become impervious to this kind of murder? Or both? I don't know. You know, these teens, suddenly everyone knows what their best angles are, how to perfectly capture, you know what I mean? Like, they're very savvy about this.

32:09 Wes: Yeah, you got to do. You got to do the duck. The duck lips, apparently. I don't know why people think that helps.

32:16 Erin: It used to take an entire studio system of experts in different areas of, you know, image consulting and curation to help movie stars become the best versions of themselves. And even those movie stars often were not self aware enough to know what was being captured. And now it seems everyone is their own image consultant. And this kind of knowledge is very, very opaque to me. So it's, it's shocking that somebody could apparently successfully do this. To know themselves so well from the outside and to get that kind of distance from the self. It's very eerie to me.

32:51 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking about this idea that when she says it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed and that's a kind of sublimated murder, that people are very comfortable with doing this with themselves. Right. Symbolically possessing themselves with these selfies and the sense in which that is a kind of murder. And of course, anything that puts us into the realm of the image and the imaginary, I think it subtracts from life, you know, in ways that we've. We've talked about before because it takes us outside of the immediate experience, but it is also just concerned with one aspect of the experience, which is the visual. So we're not even worried in that moment, you know, as we haven't. We're like. It's as if we have an image consultant. But we're not worried about our character, for instance. We're just worried about how we look in a particular moment in time in an image. And so we're imagining the other. We're more strongly oriented to the other on a specific axis of the. Involving the image. Right. So there's a lot of Ways to be caught up in how others see us or in the field of recognition that others supply. But how one looks, of course, is just a very, very thin part of that. And to be oriented towards that, I think, is part of this murder and involved with cameras.

34:15 Erin: Oh, I see, yeah. So you're reducing the self, or you're killing off several layers of self in fantasy.

34:23 Wes: Right, yeah. There's benefits to that, because if the image is just a signifier for all the rest of it, well, that's a very controllable thing in the moment. You just have to be able to pose correctly, and then it's not actually about who you are or even how you were feeling at that particular moment. Why not? If you're feeling sad at the tourist site, why not take a picture of yourself looking sad and remember that actual feeling? That's the part of the memory that is apt to get erased by the attempt at being an image consultant to oneself. But she does talk about how the gun replacement thing, and she talks about this with safaris. Right. It's an interesting example. So guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been, what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered mortal needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot, but when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. And so this is a segue into the idea that photography is an instrument of nostalgia. There's a touch of pathos. You can do it even with a grotesque subject. There's something that photography does to dignify the subject and participate in people's mortality, because the subject is going to pass away. So whatever you've preserved. So this runs cross current, I think, to what she's been saying, which is that this preserving quality to photographs highlights, by contrast, the mortality and temporality and temporariness of the objects or subjects that it's recording. My photos are going to live forever in the cloud, but not me. It's not fair.

36:18 Erin: Right, right. Well, once we can upload your consciousness to the cloud, then it'll all be shortly.

36:24 Wes: Soon.

36:24 Erin: Yeah. Then you'll be a collection of photos with a curating consciousness, which. Which is, I think, a little bit of what she's getting at here, but I don't want to get ahead of myself, but the idea that something about the preservation with the camera highlights the temporariness of the thing being photographed, as you put it. This is where things get kind of interestingly tricky. I'm pulling partly from The Arbus essay. This idea of the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. I think Sontag would argue that we need to know what we're taking in a photograph, say of a panda, that pandas are endangered, for that photograph to have some kind of moral purchase. Right. She's going to describe the narrativizing or the contextualizing need for photographs to really explain anything or to have any kind

37:20 Wes: of weight, ethical or political effect.

37:23 Erin: Right, right. It's as though the default mode of the camera is one which is anti moral. And to be put to a moral use. Photos need historical context and an overriding narrative for which they would then come in as secondary items to just furnish evidence toward an already established moral framework or position. So when we have a camera and we're taking photos of something like say we are war photographers and we're photographing people dying in front of us, something about having a camera in that moment, she would argue, justifies that position. You know, it's okay for us to be there watching people die in front of us because we're recording it. So I think this is what she talks about with the camera being a passport. And there's no moral boundary. You know, the moral boundary that might be there that might make us say, turn away from that moment is evaporated because we're a war photographer and that's what we're there to do is photograph people dying, say. So it seems almost anti moral or outside of morality entirely to be walking around with a camera. Or it may even be pro immorality. Like if we're, if we're, if we're taking a photograph of someone doing something which we might deem immoral. She says that the relationship of the person with the camera to the thing that they are photographing is one of encouragement. So the person might even be encouraged to keep going because they see that they're being photographed. And if we're going to contrast that with this idea of the preservation of nature or something which has maybe a moral weight attached to it, or a photograph which we want to serve a moral end, like showing a part of the Amazon rainforest which has been cut down, you know, taking pictures of the stumps of trees to serve a moral point, we would need a larger apparatus of narrative to even understand why that photo might be moral. I mean, maybe I'm arguing against myself because when I see that, I might be sad just seeing trees cut down. But I think Sontag would argue that one would need to have it explained to them that the Amazon is being cut down because people are, you know, whatever, building McDonald's and need. Need trees cut down in the Amazon to furnish the wood to build those McDonald's. And this is a bad thing, and here's evidence of it. And then you see the image of the Amazon cut down and you're filled with moral indignation at this image. In other words, there's a default amoral or immoral position that the camera typically has. And when put toward some kind of end, which is supposed to be propagandistic or moralistic in a sort of positive way, it needs a lot of extra help to get somebody there, to get them to a moral position, which we would consider to be on the plus side of that equation.

40:23 Wes: Yeah, you're getting at the point that she makes about the use of photographs in service of conscience and in service of political and moral feeling. And she makes this interesting point that it's different for conscience than it is for desire. So in a way, desire is ahistorical. You just need certain archetypes, like if you want to induce sexual lust, you just. There's pictures of bodies. But if you want to arouse moral feelings and historical context is very important, if you want to awaken conscience, you need a given historical situation, and the context around that has to be clear. So she brings up, for instance, the example of Civil War battlefield photographs. Not dampening enthusiasm for the war, for instance. You're not going to just produce the feeling of revulsion for the war with a photograph. There's not already the seed of that revulsion already there. Or for instance, photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one and help build up a nascent one. And so she brings up, of course, that famous picture of the Vietnamese child who's just been napalmed, that iconic picture. And that did a lot right to increase revulsion against the Vietnam War. But by contrast, the Korean. Well, actually, I think the point she makes about the Korean War was that there was no photographic record or not much. And there wasn't because the ideology did not allow that right. There was no space for that because of a pre existing ideology. So if we want to produce photographic evidence, we're doing that in the context of an ideology or in the context of a naming of an event or the context of an existing political consciousness. We're not just going to invent a political consciousness whole cloth by use of photographs. And then she goes on to talk about her own personal experience seeing Holocaust photographs and how important that was to her and life changing. I mean, that was for me, actually, as a kid too. She says it divided her life into two parts and I kind of felt the same way. But the overall point, despite that example, is that it doesn't. Right. These photographs aren't necessarily going to strengthen conscience. They can also corrupt it, anesthetize it. Because through such photographs we get this repeated exposure, we get inured, we get used to atrocities and seeing things that might have once have shocked us. The shock kind of fades. So it's really a double edged sword. She says it can deaden the conscience as much as arouse it.

43:11 Erin: She talks about the omnipresence of photographs having an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility, how we can be inured to those images. And we'll wrap up here, but in the next part, maybe we can begin by talking about what she might be implying about unethical comportment towards photographs. Like she calls photographs themselves an ethics of seeing. They're furnishing an ethics of seeing. And I'm wondering if she is implicitly pushing back against that or showing us maybe some ways to think about how we might push back against the perhaps too transgressive mode of seeing which photographs are furnishing us with. So maybe we can dive into that at the beginning of part two. All right, thanks, Wes.

43:56 Wes: Thank you.

Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman.

Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Amadeus. We just got done. Sort of are still talking about Mozart's relationship to the divine and whether or not he might be something like a Christ figure. And I just wanted to talk about Salieri's own relationship with his father. We hear that his father is a man of commerce. And so Salieri, he seems to relate to God in this way, in this economic system kind of way where every prayer should be immediately rewarded and the hard work of self denial should result in God's favor. That, you know, he's making these sort of long term investments in asceticism and self denial that should see a return through the genius that God will give him and the ability to sing to him. And so some of that seems to be a result of his relationship with his father, who is not at all interested in music. And Salieri seems to think, and even asks the priest, who we haven't even mentioned is his interlocutor through the entire film, because the whole thing is one long flashback told from Salieri's perspective. You know, wouldn't you have thought this was a sign that this miracle had happened? And the miracle, of course, is his father choking on something, probably a meatball and dropping dead. And that frees Salieri up to pursue his musical career, which his father had previously denied. So I don't know. I just. I don't know that there's. There's much to be said about this that we haven't already said. But I'm so interested in this paternal relationship with Salieri and God, Salieri and his father, of the two being so diametrically opposed to each other in one way. Well, in terms of Salieri's relationship to them, right. Like he so doesn't care for his father that he thinks of killing him off as this huge convenience. And yet he's so in love with God and with wanting to sing to God that he gives up his whole life for his love of that paternal figure. Of course, it's also about his own narcissism and self glorification and looking like a really big and important person. But I don't know, I find it really knotty and difficult to untie that twin strand of these two father figures in his life.

2:40 Wes: The two father figures being his father and the.

2:43 Erin: And God.

2:44 Wes: And God. Okay.

2:45 Erin: Yeah.

2:45 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting, he says about his father. How could I tell him what music meant to me? That's when, you know, he tells his father he wishes he could be like Mozart. And the father says, why? Do you want to be a trained monkey? You'd like me to drag you around doing tricks like a circus freak? Sam, I have a homicidal feeling. How could I tell him what music meant to me? And, yeah, music is everything. Music is a religious experience for him. It's his way of connecting to God. And so it means more than commerce or a practical profession. And the miracle is that. Yeah, the first miracle is that his father dies. And we get no sense that he's sad about his father's death or that he has any sort of familial feeling, you know, typical feeling towards his. Towards his father, any love. And it's interesting he uses that word, that little transition, you know, where it's. Do you know what happened? A miracle that occurs twice in the film. The second time is when Joseph yawns. Emperor Joseph yawns, so he says. And then. And then. Do you know what happened? A miracle. With that yawn, I saw my defeat turn into victory. Mozart was lucky the emperor yawned only once. And before that, he's really getting into the music. It's the Marriage of Figaro. So he Sundays. The restored third act was bold, brilliant. The fourth was astounding. I saw a woman disguised in her maid's clothes, hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. There's another really great song that. That is premised on this idea. You know the song where someone puts out a classified ad to find love and it turns then the person who responds to it is his wife.

4:45 Erin: Oh, you mean if you're into peanuts in pina coladas

4:51 Wes: getting caught in the ring. Yeah. So, anyway, I don't know which one is better. Marriage. A figure or that one. But anyway.

4:59 Erin: So, yeah, it's hard to talk about. Okay.

5:01 Wes: So offered. We hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater conferring on all who sat there perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable. Making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar. There's this really interesting juxtaposition in Salieri between his ability to appreciate the music and to feel almost gratitude towards it. To have this very, very authentic, appreciative relationship to Mozart's music and yet to have crippling envy at the same time. And you see it at various points in the film where Mozart asks him, what'd you think of that? And he responds honestly, like, it's amazing. He doesn't hide that. He doesn't try to conceal that. And as part of his revenge plan against Mozart, he can't help himself. He can't help but completely appreciate and inhabit the music and even see its kind of divine nature. Right? One observation was that it contains longing. This other observation is that it contains forgiveness another sort of divine element. He makes the immediate switch from that to his envy and desire for revenge. And the miracle, of course, it's not a religious miracle. The religious miracle in this is replaced by the miracle that serves envy or malice or the eradication of whatever gets in his way. Whatever gets in the way of his plan to make music his life. In the first case, it was his father, and now it's Mozart. His father was the impediment. Mozart is the impediment. And the miracle is the removal of that impediment. The miracle is an expression of divine authority, right? Divine power. Something that shows up in the world and breaks the rules of the laws of nature or something like that, and so forth and therefore is illustrative of God's power. The miracle is just some chance circumstance that gets rid of an obstacle. So I thought you were talking about Father. It's not like Mozart is a father figure to him exactly except insofar as he worships him as an artist and a musician. But they do certainly stand in parallel here in being these impediments to his success which he has. To which she has to remove. Very Oedipal, as they would say in the psychoanalytic community.

7:49 Erin: Right.

7:50 Wes: Kill. Kill the father.

7:51 Erin: Right. Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting idea, that. It's almost as if Salieri is so unbothered by his own father's death because God is his. It's like a case of secret parentage, right? God is his real father because he has this extra hereditary gift that doesn't seem to really come from his father. Right. It's almost this sort of switched at birth type of thing or. And, of course, Salieri's whole identity. Well, switched at birth is maybe right, because it's as if Salieri's whole identity is about actually being this secret, divine, anointed, special boy, right. Who likes himself because everybody likes him. He's following what he thinks is this divinely appointed mission. And then maybe the entrance of Mozart. I like this idea that he's almost kind of like a father figure, but maybe it's also this. He was really the one who was. You know, Salieri maybe really was his father's son all along. And it was like Mozart again, the sibling thing. Like, you know, oh, suddenly you have this. You find out God had a second family or something like that. And those kids all, you know, like, we're these super high achievers. And you previously at the very. Thinking of yourself as being at the very end of the bell curve, you know, suddenly look to your left and discover that there's a whole lot more empty space. And then that other kid from that other family way into it.

9:32 Wes: The people who this has happened to kind of. But, yeah.

9:35 Erin: Oh, gosh.

9:36 Wes: Well, not finding out they have a second family, but when the parent moves on and has another family with a different, you know, with a stepmother, and then that new family is all shiny and pretty and highly accomplished, and the one that the father left is. Is not.

9:53 Erin: Of course. Of course. Right, well. And that. That would stand to reason, especially if the first family was a. Was sort of the means by which the father established himself. Right, right. Yeah. And then. Then he gets to sort of start over with a fresher. A person he feels he deserved. I just rewatched First Wives Club, so the.

10:12 Wes: I don't think I've seen it.

10:13 Erin: Oh, my gosh. And it's like, it's good. It's one of those movies that I just. I discovered that my best friend had never seen it. And I was like, how do you even know anything about me if you've never seen this movie? It's so, so important to me.

10:27 Wes: This is from 1996. Okay.

10:29 Erin: Yeah. If you look at the cast list, you understand Keaton.

10:33 Wes: Yeah. Now I. Yeah, I'm looking at. Yeah, it makes sense.

10:37 Erin: It's kind of like the ultimate boomer movie. But I Love it so much. It has nothing to do with anything. I'm so sorry. Maybe just to switch gears a little bit. There's also a lot, I think, being said here about criticism. I mean, really, Salieri's gift is this gift of appreciation. It is like a divine appreciation that nobody else has because they're too stupid to get it. Like, Salieri is just smart enough. I mean, this is the torture, right? He's just smart enough to really get the divinity of Mozart's talent but not smart enough to produce it himself. And that's kind of the. It's kind of the critical sweet spot. You know, if Salieri wanted to become a critic, a music critic I don't know if they had those in Vienna or.

11:20 Wes: He could have been a producer, you

11:21 Erin: know, or a producer. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

11:24 Wes: I'm gonna make you a star. That would have been the positive way to deal with the situation.

11:31 Erin: Right, right. And that, too, I think, you know, the idea of criticism, I mean, this is a thorny one too, but there's a parental kind of relationship which criticism or the role of the critic maybe reveals. Or there's a sort of similar mechanism, the role that he ends up playing with the Requiem to kind of bring out what he's not, really bringing out the best in Mozart. Mozart doesn't really need him to produce the Requiem. He doesn't. Certainly doesn't need him to produce anything of greatness. But that semi collaboration that happens at the end is a really interesting moment. But there's. There's something where the first thing I thought of, and I thought the first thing that you would. You would think of in that scene is there's something vampiric, of course, about Salieri. He really is kind of a vampire figure. And I'm sure our listeners were expecting us to say this seeing as we've talked about that vampiric mechanism of envy in other episodes. But he does seem to be sucking the life out of Mozart. And so the film doesn't seem to be very appreciative, shall we say, of the role of criticism, on the one hand. But on the other, there does seem to be this sort of lost or forgotten trajectory or abandoned, maybe, trajectory that Salieri might have had of being the person who, of course, it would just be within the court of being the champion of Mozart. The one who. And this is an important critical function, not just to criticize. Right. But to bring greatness to other people's attention. And to say, this is worth holding up, this is important.

13:07 Wes: It's an interesting Paradox. In the end. Because he wants him to produce the Requiem so he can pass it off as his own. And so he needs to keep Mozart alive long enough to do that. But he's also somehow aware that he's using this to kill Mozart. Right. Which. It's an odd way to go about killing someone.

13:29 Erin: It is, Right.

13:30 Wes: Giving them. I'm gonna psychologically torture you to death. How about that? By pretending to be your dead father and asking for this commission. Right. He's not doing anything else I. I don't know about. Right. He's not poisoning.

13:45 Erin: No. And this is. Yeah, this gets back to my opening question. Like, what is he doing here? Is he killing him? Is what is really happening?

13:54 Wes: Oh, was that your. Was that what you meant by that?

13:57 Erin: A little bit. But also other things. Sorry, it's a complicated question and there are a lot of different elements to it, but I think.

14:04 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. He thinks he's killed him at the end of the film. But was that ever. Does he state. We don't. In the flashbacks, we don't really see him state that intention, do we? He wants to ruin him, but we don't. Yeah. Right. We don't ever see. Or do we. Do we say that he's right. We see the old Salieri say he wanted to kill him. But do we ever see the young Salieri say that? That's the question.

14:31 Erin: I don't think so.

14:33 Wes: Yeah. I don't remember him saying that. He wants to ruin him. He wants to get an opera passed off as his own.

14:39 Erin: The Mass passed off as his own. Yeah. And then he'll have this great joke. He does say. There is the implication somehow that Mozart will be dead and so he won't be found out.

14:50 Wes: Okay.

14:50 Erin: So that is part of it. I'm trying to find the exact moment.

14:55 Wes: So much of this is in the narrative. And the voiceover of old Salieri that does create the opportunity to wonder what's actually going on. Anyway, obviously he has ill intent and he cares about ruining Mozart. Or he doesn't. He certainly doesn't care about preserving Mozart's life except to the extent that it'll help him.

15:15 Erin: Yeah, here's the. Here's the Finish the opera.

15:18 Wes: But yeah.

15:18 Erin: The old Salieri voiceover. My plan was so simple that it terrified me. First I must get the death mass and then I must achieve his death. Achieve his death is actually a really great verb. His funeral. Imagine it. The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin. Mozart's little coffin in the Middle. And then in that silence, music. A divine music bursts out over them all. A great Mass of death. Requiem Mass for Wolfgang Mozart. Composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri. And this is where he almost does that. Hannibal Lecter, Salieri, like, you know, like he's sucking the life out of him. What sublimity. What depth. What passion in the music. Salieri has been touched. Touched by God at last. And God forced to listen. Powerless to stop it. I, for once, in the end, laughing at him. The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it. Very different when you. When you have to do it with your own hands. And so that sort of left open. I mean, this is total insanity. This is really why we, I guess, see him in the insane asylum because he otherwise seems sane. But the idea that he's pulling one over on God, like, you know, it's really funny.

16:34 Wes: But it does make it seem like killing would be a separate step. And then maybe he'd never had to do that just because Mozart did the job of dying beforehand.

16:46 Erin: Yeah, maybe. Something about embodying the father. Right. And hounding him.

16:50 Wes: Yeah, that's the impression I got, that the. That was. But it's an odd way to try to kill someone. I mean, so that does this. If we wanted evidence of a unreliable narrator in that sense, then that would be it.

17:04 Erin: Right.

17:04 Wes: He's recasting this whole project as. You know, it's not just, I'm gonna get the Requiem for myself but it's coming. And not just that I'm gonna ruin Mozart or interfere with his fortunes, but that I'm gonna. That I killed him as well.

17:21 Erin: Well. And in the end, he's the one who feels killed, in fact, because old Salieri tells the priest, he says, you're a merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. 32 years of torture of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all. So it's as if Mozart actually has sucked the life out of him. You know, there's a sort of reverse vampirism going on in that. Mozart getting the last laugh. But then Mozart outliving him and Salieri becoming sort of undead.

17:59 Wes: He does have that quality.

18:01 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.

18:02 Wes: Well, we are talking about the vampiric quality.

18:05 Erin: Yeah, definitely.

18:06 Wes: In a way.

18:07 Erin: Yeah.

18:07 Wes: I see the Film, in a way, is about mediocrity. And that's. You know, it's a great scene at the end where he's. He's being wheeled out and mediocrites. I absolve you. As if he's the. As if he's the priest now. Priest of the high priest of mediocrity. The torture of being mediocre. Maybe almost being a genius, but not quite having it. How do you live with that?

18:34 Erin: That's the most compelling line in the film for me. Why did God give me the longing if he wasn't going to fulfill it? Salieri has some really twisted ideas about his relationship with God in which he's been almost, if you like, set up by God in a way. I mean, part of it is his own structure of thinking, but he's also been set up to believe that his relationship with God is one of wish fulfillment. But granted, he has a lot of really parsimonious, really false, really twisted ideas of who God is and what our relationship should be to the divine and magical thinking and narcissism and all this other stuff. But that. That's the one really unanswerable question I think, that. That he asks in the film is why do I have the longing? And with that, I think, implicated in that is the just enough talent to know where you aren't. And that, I think, is a really torturous thing about being human. I think we all understand this on. On a certain level. Like on. On a level that maybe isn't still close to Salieri's.

19:48 Wes: But we didn't write 40. 40 operas.

19:51 Erin: Right, right, right. Or really understand and study and give up so much.

19:58 Wes: Right, but that's the. In a way, that's the answer to the why be given this longing if he's not going to be able to fulfill it? And the answer, in a way, is that he wants it too much. And Mozart is sort of the poster boy for not wanting it too much. And the longing goes into the art object and into what he creates, rather than stifling the act of creation itself.

20:21 Erin: Well, yes, and as I've already suggested, I think there's very little in Salieri's when he's not talking about Mozart and the beauty of Mozart's music. There's very little in Salieri's speeches talking about his own relationship to music that isn't actually just about status and wanting to be. Wanting to be the greatest. Wanting to get all the gold stars and be the smartest boy in school. And he's at the top of the heap and everybody likes him and all his teachers love him. And then of course, this exchange student comes in who's doing high level calculus in his head in the third grade and just ruining his life. Right. So in a way, it's. He deserves it, but that, you know, I wanted to just talk about that a bit and that relationship to the other members of the court and the fact that Salieri, when he's asked whether the opera that they're commissioning, for instance, should be in German or Italian, Salieri won't offer an opinion. He doesn't. When solicited for these types of musical opinions, he offers a political answer designed to keep him in with everybody else. So he's really good at being an operator. He's really good at keeping his post and being in this really cozy and obviously extremely wealthy position. He wants everybody to love him and to think that he's great and that he's this beloved son of God. And he has this obviously tremendous admiration for Mozart, but for him, the relationship with music seems really tied up in politics. And then we see Mozart's own relationship to politics on scales both big and small, and how inept he really is at controlling himself to get along in order to make any money. Like he has no understanding of how to deal with people. And he's also not interested in the political in his work, which is a point made when they talk about the Marriage of Figaro being banned, which is kind of an interesting scene we could go to.

22:11 Wes: Sure.

22:12 Erin: The emperor confronts him about how the Marriage of Figaro shouldn't be staged. It stirs up hatred between the classes, I think the emperor says. And Mozart says, well, I hate politics. You know, this isn't about politics. And then he goes into just the structure of this one musical piece that he really loves and where he keeps adding more and more people into the harmony and ultimately says that he sustains this for 20 minutes of continuous music. And he says, in a play, if more than one person speaks at once, it's just noise. But with opera, with music, you can have 20 individuals all talking at the same time. And it's not noise, it's perfect harmony.

22:52 Wes: Yeah.

22:53 Erin: So I love this idea. Like the idea that music is about harmony, not political strife, not about separating people. But of course, Joseph is talking about his sister Antoinette and how things are going really badly for her. So there's also something to be said for not inciting any more political strife than what he wants to deal with.

23:14 Wes: Get my sister killed.

23:15 Erin: Right, right. Salieri is Writing operas with the themes that the academy approves in air quotes. Academy approves, you know, these mythological subjects which are extra historical, which don't really get into the weeds. And Mozart is about the personal and the ignoring kind of the political in a way, or being oblivious to it.

23:38 Wes: Yeah. Joseph pivots from the whole politics objection to the idea that this is rubbish or vulgar.

23:47 Erin: Right.

23:47 Wes: He says, Mozart, music is not the issue here. This is in response to the whole 20 individuals in harmony. Music is not the issue here. No one doubts your talent. It's your literary judgment that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, it would still remain a vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on so much rubbish? Surely you can choose more elevated themes. Right. And this is sort of in line with Salieri's idea that Mozart himself ought to be more elevated as a character since his music is. Right. So the content of Mozart's character and also the content of, you know, the libretto or the play it's based on should reflect the beauty of the music. Mozart says elevated. What does that mean, elevated? I am fed up to the teeth with these elevated things. Old dead legends. Why must we go on forever writing of gods and legends? And Salieri says, because they do. They go on forever.

24:44 Erin: That's von Sweetness.

24:45 Wes: That's not Salieri.

24:46 Erin: Yeah, that's right. And Joseph. Yeah, and Joseph also isn't the one who says this. This thing about the vulgar farce. That's von Sweetin, too.

24:55 Wes: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's an error. I created a transcript using AI and I had to get speaker attributions. I had to get it to guess them. And for the most part, it did a good job. But. Yeah, it did.

25:08 Erin: Really.

25:08 Wes: All right.

25:09 Erin: Yeah.

25:09 Wes: So. Yeah. So they represent the eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us, Mozart, you and me, just the same as His Majesty. Rejection of the elevated theme in favor of, you know, what's going on in the Marriage of Figaro, which is something more, I guess you put it, it's more personal.

25:25 Erin: Yes, I suppose, because Don Giovanni, the reading of Gian Giovanni. Yeah.

25:30 Wes: Oh, is this Don Giovanni?

25:31 Erin: Sorry, no, no, this is Marriage of Figaro. But I just mean in general, in Mozart's work, it seems that he wants or he includes or values a personal connection in the material. You can argue here. Well, he's sort of about farce and he's a farcical character, so perhaps that's the personal element that he connects with. But I'm. The Salieri interpretation of Don Giovanni as being a Very personal statement about his father that. That must be characterizing all of Mozart's work. And there must be something in this that's really speaking to him that he really loves, which he kind of indicates in his description of the scene that he read. So maybe not personal, but just. He likes it. He thinks this is something he can work with.

26:15 Wes: There's more, maybe, about human relationships. Right. It's a very. The way it's portrayed by Salieri. The relationship between the husband and the wife, for instance. Or Mozart himself gives us an account of the way it begins with the measuring for what, the bridal bed.

26:33 Erin: Yes.

26:33 Wes: Yeah. It's more involved in direct human concerns. It's more down to earth than just mythology that turns out to be actually a very good vehicle for the sublime. Right. For longing, unfulfilled longing. And the things that Celliar appreciates. You don't need the elevated themes to get the elevation, let's say. The content doesn't have to reflect that.

26:57 Erin: Yeah. And that seems to me a really good and important element of how the film understands art overall. And just Mozart as an artist. I think it's really smart about what really excites artists and how maybe how Salieri is lacking in ways which he doesn't even appreciate. He's very much coloring within the lines throughout his career. And this doesn't seem to be even a question for him of what he really connects with, what he really wants to be writing about. You know, that doesn't seem to cross his mind at all. Is there something big that we're missing here? I guess we haven't really talked about Stanzi much.

27:35 Wes: Good old Stanzi.

27:37 Erin: She's. She's kind of. Kind of great. Poor woman had to deal with a lot. Oh, I know. The too many notes idea, too. We should really get to. I wanted to talk about that, actually, in relationship to this whole criticism thing. Right. You know, this idea. You could only hear so much at once.

27:57 Wes: Yeah. So it's Orsini Rosenberg who brings this up earlier. Right. So calls his piece tiresome. And let's see. A young man trying to impress beyond his abilities. Too much spice, too many notes. The way Salieri characterizes us later on. This is the premiere of the Abduction, he says, showing off like the greedy songbird that she was, he's talking about is the woman he's into. Ten minutes of ghastly scales. Arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground. And then he's worried about the fact that Mozart slept with Her. And then when we get Joseph's reaction, it's good. Of course, now and then. Just now and then it seemed to touch. And then Orsini Rosenberg eventually fills it in, you know, with the whole. Too many notes. Very well put. Too many notes, Mozart. I don't understand. There are just as many notes as I required, neither more nor less. Joseph, my dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in an evening. And then he asks Salieri if he's right and then Salieri agrees. So this is one of those times when Salieri is, in fact, not honest. And Mozart said, this is absurd. Later on, Salieri. Yeah. As you pointed out, casts that in terms of the fact that Joseph is easily bored. He doesn't. What is it? The royal attention.

29:23 Erin: Too many demands on the royal ear.

29:26 Wes: Royal ear, yeah. Yeah. So Salieri understands that. Yeah. This is really a matter of their inability to appreciate. Not anything that Mozart's doing wrong.

29:39 Erin: Yeah, the too many notes idea. I suppose it's suggestive of restraint or keeping things simple. You know, Joseph is accused by Salieri of needing. Or maybe the people of Vienna, or the court, rather, of Vienna of needing to have that bang at the end of the song. So everyone knows when to clap. Or maybe that's his friend from the lower. The theater who makes that observation. I can't quite remember now. But, you know, at first we think that this is about them just being stupid, like musically stupid or Mozart being beyond all of them. But then we discover that, in fact, the common people are really into Mozart and there's a sort of, like, class distinction being made, which is odd. So the court of Vienna is more like the. A parallel would be something like the French Academy and then, say, the Impressionists rebelling against that and portraying the common people and being interested in more lowly subjects. You know, ordinary people as subjects rather than classical myth and great heroes of history and things like that. And so something about Mozart's subject and his interest in the common people seems also to be borne out by his appreciation by the common people that we see later in the film. Though I'm not sure I buy that. I mean, he did die poor. But anyway, you know, as we close

31:05 Wes: out here, a little history. What? Yeah. Why did he die poor? Too many notes.

31:13 Erin: I'm not 100% sure. I haven't refreshed my memory on that. I mean, he wasn't. He did feel that Salieri was pushing him out of certain things. That there was a cabal at court of people who were pushing him out of appointments. He was passed over to be the music teacher of that woman. I forget who it was. Joseph's niece. Maybe he was passed over to be her teacher. I don't think there was really a guy with a lot of dogs that he had to resort to, but certainly he was passed over for things as a result of jealousy. I don't know how much of that. I mean, Mozart was in the letters, a really intelligent and sensitive guy. So I doubt that he had the sort of social problems that Mozart seems to have in the film of not being able to get along with people at all and being kind of a jerk. So I'm not quite sure. Well, Wes, it's time to leave genius behind and go back to mediocrity. Is that. Is that what we're all doing? This is one of my favorite movies. I love this movie so much. So I hope you enjoyed it and weren't put off by the length. I know you were. I made you watch the Director's cut.

32:21 Wes: No, I actually. No, no, I enjoyed it.

32:25 Erin: Oh, great. Great. Yeah. The stagings of the opera scenes are also just incredible. I love the Queen of the Night.

32:32 Wes: Yeah, it's really funny.

32:33 Erin: Twyla Tharp staged it, so. All right, thank you.

32:37 Wes: Thank you.

If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician’s relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long-term loan of musical talent. Salieri’s economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral—he’s ”a giggling, dirty creature” in the words of Salieri—but has received the equivalent of a billion-dollar loan. Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin discuss the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman.

Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.

Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.

Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Transcript

0:11 Erin: If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician's relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long term loan of musical talent. Salieri's economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral. He's a giggling dirty creature, in the words of Salieri, but has received the equivalent of a billion dollar loan. Are Mozart's gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri's design which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Today we're discussing the 1984 film Amadeus, directed by Milo Schwerman. This is Erin Olonek, this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, do you think that Salieri murdered Mozart?

1:17 Wes: Are we talking historically or are we talking within the world of the film?

1:24 Erin: Let's say both.

1:25 Wes: Well, historically, as far as I know, it's very inaccurate. Yeah, Salieri was very successful. And there's no evidence he was worried about Mozart.

1:34 Erin: Well, there's a little evidence.

1:36 Wes: Okay, all right, well, you have to tell me about it. So within the world of the film, is he an unreliable narrator? That really honestly didn't occur to me, but I guess it's possible. What do you think?

1:47 Erin: Well, his being an unreliable narrator or.

1:50 Wes: Yeah, within the world of the film, did he not kill Mozart? I mean, is there a possibility he's misreporting?

1:57 Erin: I think so. The one scene that really makes me think directly about that dynamic of this unreliable narration is actually after Salieri's opera when Mozart comes down and gives his non compliment compliments to Salieri, which I find really painful. And it occurred to me as I was watching that maybe this was something Salieri's sort of impression of what Mozart said to him, that maybe Mozart was actually giving him real compliments, in other words, and Salieri was remembering it as this cruel mockery. Like when one hears such sounds, what can one think but Salieri or something like that. He didn't know such music was possible. And that was just a moment where I thought, well, that's really kind of a matter of perception on Salieri's part. And it just reminded me that we are getting all of this filtered through his perspective. And what else might he have misinterpreted, exaggerated? I'm not saying that that is either of those things, but it could be. I mean, Mozart himself thought that he was poisoned at the end of his life speech. Yeah. Which gave rise to the theory that Salieri had poisoned him because they were competitors. And Mozart did think that Salieri had iced him out of certain positions. Talked badly about him, though. Salieri was really well loved. He was the teacher of, among others, Mozart's own son. So presumably there was no ill will there. But Beethoven was a good friend of Beethoven's, actually, which is not an easy thing to be good friends with Beethoven.

3:38 Wes: What did you say? I know it's more than deafness probably, but.

3:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah, just a really kind of unpleasant guy. There's a list in this article I gave you I really like and listeners will really enjoy this. Albert Borowitz, who was kind of a true crime expert, wrote lots of books about crime. He has this article from the 70s called Salieri and the Murder of Mozart. And this predates the Shaffer play by a couple of years. So it doesn't get into that. You know, maybe it even kind of precipitated that cultural moment of everyone being obsessed with Mozart again. But he gives a really great outline of the cultural milieu of Mozart and Salieri, what we actually know from the record, from letters, and then how the story of Salieri poisoning Mozart ended up kind of blowing up into this urban myth. And then Pushkin.

4:33 Wes: Did it not start with Pushkin's?

4:35 Erin: No, it was in the ether before that.

4:37 Wes: Mozart and Salieri.

4:38 Erin: Okay, yeah, it was in the ether before that. And then Pushkin took it and ran with it. And then of course, that play was the basis of Amadeus, this article that

4:47 Wes: you're about to read from. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to read it, but I do want to read it. But yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, tell us.

4:54 Erin: He writes about what a well liked guy Salieri was. He was undoubtedly one of the leading composers of his period and an important teacher of composition, counting among his pupils Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Hummel, Sussmayer, Sechter. I don't know how to say that. And Meyerbeer. He was also a famous teacher of singing. All his students loved and respected him. Friends remembered him as generous, warm and kind hearted and even had the ability to laugh at himself, at least at his difficulties with the German language. He must have had a way with people here, Borowitz says, since he apparently established a close personal relationship with the difficult Beethoven and then he goes on to say that Mozart's son was also a student of Salieri's. And if Constanze was really that concerned about Salieri having murdered her husband, she hardly would have allowed the son to take lessons from him. But as I said, and as the article outlines, there was a little bit of rivalry between them that was recorded in the letters. And Mozart felt he had been pushed out, passed up for opportunities because of Salieri's influence. But there was a great deal of court politics going on at the time. A lot of what the film shows, actually, I think kind of accurately captures some of that. And so there's a great deal of spiritual or poetic truth about what the film captures, certainly in terms of the wider world of the court, but also really shocking and kind of unbelievable, true things. It captures almost every detail about Mozart's funeral correctly or lack thereof. Also, the Requiem was commissioned by a masked stranger who was intending to pass off the Requiem as. As his own composition. An amateur composer, not Salieri, but the exact same dynamic. And he was kind of haunting Mozart during his last days. And Mozart literally was working on the composition on his deathbed, not with Salieri, but with another composer. So, you know, there's a lot in here, actually pretty interestingly accurate. Maybe not the pink wigs and maybe not the laugh, but.

6:54 Wes: Yeah. Where did that laugh come from? Do you know? Do you know the lore of that? The lore of the laugh?

6:59 Erin: The Tom Hulse, the director you worked with that he would not name? Yeah.

7:04 Wes: Oh, wait, say more about that.

7:06 Erin: Oh, Hulse said that he based it off of a director he worked with, but wouldn't name the guy in Adam.

7:13 Wes: Yeah, okay. But yeah, he came up with that himself. Right. Although, I guess, is it a direction within the original play to laugh like that?

7:22 Erin: I don't think so. I think it was a Hulse flourish.

7:25 Wes: Yeah. So he went from being Pinto in Animal House to being Mozart. As far as I know, that was his trajectory. Quite a force of nature with that laugh. Yeah, the giggling dirty minded creature is what Salieri calls them.

7:43 Erin: I'm curious, you've seen the film before?

7:46 Wes: Yeah, I think I saw it in the theater.

7:47 Erin: In theater as a kid.

7:49 Wes: Yeah, I saw it in the theater. Or not too long after. On vhs.

7:54 Erin: Right, right.

7:55 Wes: To date myself.

7:57 Erin: Yeah, vhs.

7:58 Wes: No, I know. I know your relationship to vhs.

8:03 Erin: You're not going to get any guff from me. Are you annoyed by Mozart? You know, I feel some people have really strong reactions to Hulse's portrayal. I find him Weirdly charming, kind of adorable.

8:19 Wes: Yeah. I think I'd find it. I don't know if charming is the word. I find it entertaining. Yeah.

8:24 Erin: It's a little strong, actually. Yeah. Entertaining. Okay. That's good.

8:26 Wes: Yeah. He falls into a category that the character, as he's portrayed. I have trouble putting him into one category or the other. Is he annoying or charismatic? I think the contrast between the beauty of Mozart's music and I suppose the kind of character that we're supposed to associate with that and then the characters he's portrayed, I think that's very effective. So it's counterintuitive. And maybe like Salieri, we wish that he were a more dignified kind of person, but I guess for the most part, it's funny. I suppose I wish he were more dignified. Right. If I'd learned this about the historical Mozart, if I. I'd be. I. That's disappointing, right?

9:15 Erin: Yes.

9:16 Wes: Or would you Would. Would you mind if Mozart turned out to really be this way in real life?

9:22 Erin: No.

9:22 Wes: Why not?

9:23 Erin: Well, the way to really think of him is he was a child star.

9:27 Wes: Right? That's a good point. Yeah.

9:29 Erin: So how surprised can we really be by crude behavior? Not only that, but much mentioned in Mozart lore is his actual love of scatological humor, which is in his letters. Though another element of that, which perhaps exonerates him a little bit, is the fact that in Vienna, people were apparently obsessed with scatological humor at the time. So he is this sort of dirty little imp occasionally in the letters, but not any different from anybody else walking around Vienna. He just wasn't this sort of lofty musician priest that F. Murray Abraham's Salieri seems to be.

10:09 Wes: Yeah. Was European civilization in its kind of kindergarten phase with respect to social transgression.

10:18 Erin: I suppose.

10:19 Wes: So they hadn't yet reached the John Belushi level of sublime transgression. They were still at the scatological phase. Just come back to the Animal House reference. Is that a movie we're going to do at some point in Animal House?

10:38 Erin: I would be very surprised if we.

10:40 Wes: Were you disappointed to find out that John Belushi was a cocaine addict. All right. So, yeah. So that's interesting. I did find that out. I did a little research into how much of this was accurate, and I did find out that, yeah, he. He liked scatological references in his. In his letters. But I'm curious about what. How those looked, actually. I don't know if you've seen details of that, but specific examples.

11:07 Erin: There's a lot of Ass related stuff.

11:11 Wes: Okay.

11:12 Erin: But yeah, I mean, nothing like, I mean, it's weird, but apparently nothing beyond the pale for what the. You know, it was like everybody was obsessed with spongebob or something. It was constantly quoting spongebob and he

11:23 Wes: really, he really was a child prodigy. And when did he compose his first symphony?

11:28 Erin: I don't know, 12 months, 13 months? No, like seven.

11:31 Wes: In the womb.

11:32 Erin: Yeah. He did something at four, something else at seven.

11:36 Wes: They were trying to play him Bach in the womb.

11:40 Erin: Cause they didn't have baby Mozart yet.

11:44 Wes: They heard Mozart coming back out.

11:46 Erin: Yeah. Baby Palestrina. Hail the God of Bingen. The child star element and the sort of arrested development quality I think actually works really well. It was funny. I was with a friend last week and I was asking her about the desert island disc selections that she would choose and talking about how, oh, it's always so easy. It's easy to pick your number one choice. The problem is when you get into the later numbers in the top 10, you know, what do you save and what don't you save? I knew that her top choice was going to be the Mozart piano sonatas. And mine was, was Judy at Carnegie Hall. And I just suddenly made the connection in my head between Mozart and Judy Garland. Like, oh, right, of course. You know, both child stars, you burn out quickly, you die young.

12:33 Wes: Right.

12:34 Erin: Both geniuses. Once in a. Once in a century, perhaps more talents. Both with really strange and difficult relationships to authority. Though that's something I want to talk about with Salieri too. I really love the flashbacks at the beginning when Salieri, who looks so much older than Mozart throughout the film is a little boy hearing of Mozart, an even younger little boy becoming famous and hearing of him. And they're both wearing blindfolds in the two parallel childhood scenes. Mozart blindfolded as he's playing the piano, this little tiny, maybe four or five year old boy, and Salieri blindfolded, playing blind man's buff in the streets with other kids at maybe 12. So not too much of an age difference between them. And so they're sort of peers or siblings vying for a parent's affection and attention. Or Salieri is vying for it anyway. But I really loved that parallel.

13:30 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting because in a way the suggestion is that Mozart has been corrupted by being a child star. Oh, yeah. And he was taken by his father around Europe. Right. For tours and to show his tricks.

13:45 Erin: Yeah. With his sister Nanneril, in certain ways, equally gifted as a prodigy.

13:50 Wes: Okay.

13:51 Erin: Yeah.

13:51 Wes: You know, in one Sense, he's corrupted by that. Or less mature. But in another sense, he has music in his bones in a way that Salieri can never have because it's almost like a cradle language. I'm assuming Salieri probably started out young, too, but we get this impression that, yeah, Mozart is effortlessly musical. It's part of his character. It's part of his freedom being in essence. And because of that, he doesn't have to try that hard, almost. That's the way it seems. At least everything comes effortlessly. He can play from memory anything he's heard. Therefore, he gets to be in a world that's completely a world of play, as opposed to seriousness and difficult effort. And so the playfulness comes out in his character is just immaturity.

14:43 Erin: We could argue that that's a criticism we could levy against the film. We do see him writing at the pool table. Laurel, A very young Cynthia Nixon reports back to Salieri that Mozart writes all night long and he is engaged in a lot of effort. I do wonder if the film makes it seem too easy in a sort of unrealistic way.

15:07 Wes: Yeah, he works constantly. We get the idea he works constant, but he's not revising, for instance, manuscripts. It's not, ooh, I wonder what. He's just taking his genius and putting it down on the page, which takes hours and hours and hours. But, yeah, I think the film does a good job of showing both those aspects, actually. You know, the amount of labor involved, but also the lack of agonizing and worry and concern that someone like Salieri in the film would have about. Is this the right phrase or.

15:39 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It seems he's taking a sort of. I think maybe even. Maybe even Salieri uses this phrase at some point, but taking divine dictation or something like that.

15:50 Wes: Yeah. Okay.

15:51 Erin: Salieri seems to be doing that, too, when he's composing the welcome march for Mozart and has the crucifix over the piano as he's working it out and then says, grazie, signore, you know.

16:04 Wes: Yeah.

16:05 Erin: And then, of course, he'll return to the crucifix angrily later and sarcastically say, grazie, signore after Mozart has embarrassed him by improving on the march in front of Salieri and the other people in the room, including the emperor. You know, there's this interesting problem that Salieri seems to have almost as a result of his deep understanding of music and his ability to really see these structures and the difficulty so intensely. I don't know what one would call that other than, say, a problem with embodiment or Something he sees Mozart as this pure vessel for this divine dictation. Just this spirit of God walking with this angel of God being given, flesh walking around. And the element of collaboration or of the idea that there is a tremendous amount of, say, mediation or it seems that Salieri is just externalizing. It seems as if he's skipping some sort of step of embodiment. Like we can connect artistic inspiration back to God if we're believers or to the Holy Spirit because ultimately God made us. But any inspiration is also kind of the result of our own gifts and what use we put them to and what's being channeled and what's been properly developed in us and all of these other factors that have to deal really intensely with how we are collaborating with that kind of inspiration. And it seems like there's just this idea in Salieri that Mozart is just a vessel. And when he sees the incarnational reality of him, Salieri is so disillusioned because he doesn't somehow understand humanity in a really fundamental way which, of course means that he's never going to be a great musician by default. Right? Because he doesn't understand that embodiment element, that incarnational, if you like, element which, you know, I think there are a lot of parallels being made sort of winkingly between Mozart and Christ throughout the film. But, yeah, that incarnation, I don't know how else to put it. It's a sort of weird thing because it's about inspiration rather than anything related to morality or something else which we might tie more distinctly to a kind of embodiment.

18:27 Wes: Well, this is, you know, it's the old question of can we separate the artist from their art? And in this case, he seems to think that the character of the Creator ought to be reflected in the character of the thing produced. Or rather, it's the other way around. So if what Mozart is producing is beautiful, why wouldn't he, as a character, be. Why wouldn't his character be beautiful, which is to say, somehow morally upstanding? And that's the kind of bargain that Salieri, early on thinks he's made with God. It's interesting because he will. He will call Mozart the voice of God which is a very different relationship to God than what he imagines himself having early on, where he says, lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world. Make me immortal after I die. Let people speak my name with love for what I wrote. In return I will give you my chastity, my Industry, my deepest humility every hour of my life. Amen. That's a kind of bargain where he's going to be ascetic, morally upright, in return for a gift that he can use to glorify himself, both himself and God. It's not like he produces beautiful things because he's morally upright. It's just he's gonna give me the talent, and then I'll trade you back the moral uprightness. But in the case of Mozart, he has this expectation that a vulgar person couldn't possibly produce such beautiful things, which, you know, I'm kind of sympathetic on one level. We know it's not true. Of course we know that the character of artists and thinkers and all kinds of brilliant people, they're not necessarily such great people. Even if what they're producing is great. It doesn't work that way. But somehow it's hard to give up that wish or that expectation. I don't know what you call it, that one would match the other. And why is that? Why do we. Well, I don't know if you feel the same way, but if you do, why do we have that need for them to line up?

20:46 Erin: Well, I'm certain I do have that need when it comes to certain people. For me, in this film, it seems important or maybe even essential that Mozart, for instance, be obsessed with scatological humor or be kind of a philanderer or be this person who's burning really brightly, living really intensely because he needs to be a kind of a rebuke to Salieri, though Salieri is not really understanding what that rebuke means or what it constitutes. I think that this bargain that you're talking about, which is. Which is a great word for Salieri and this. This divine accounting that he seems to be doing, it's very much, of course, the result of magical thinking. It's very similar to music itself, which is, of course, the most abstract art form, which is, I think, the reason why it's so closely identified with. With the divine or why music can be called, you know, the Voice of God or something like that by Salieri. Mozart's down and dirty. Mozart's in the weeds. Mozart gets what it is to be human. And it's like Salieri only has half of himself. It's not really maternal or paternal thing, but it's as if Salieri only has one parent, one father figure, one divine, authoritarian father figure. And we see throughout, you know, Salieri is really about conforming with authority. Doesn't challenge authority at all until he. He breaks with God. And he's still really interested in being in with the authority figures around him at the court. But it's as if he just has this one parental element in him. And he's this. This angel who turns bad. This thing which is not fully incarnated. And Mozart has. He has another interesting relationship with. With a paternal figure, an authority figure, but one of rebellion. He has, obviously, the love of structure and complexity and authority and divinity implied in his great understanding of music. But then he's also fully human. He's about the personal. He's about pleasure. All of the messy complexity of life, cruelty, beauty, just everything mixed together. And so it seems to me that he's flawed. Of course, he's flawed in these ways which we might find annoying or even perverse. But that seems evidence to me of him being a sort of a full person in a way that Salieri is really not. And what Salieri is missing he just doesn't get throughout the entire. You know, he just sees it as. He's not been given, you know, a proper amount of gift in his sort of divine bank account from God. God hasn't deposited enough money in his account in this imaginary accounting system. And he thinks that all he needs is just to get more of that divine money. And really he should be looking in a kind of a different direction. I don't know if that means he should be, like, actually going out and sleeping with people or, like, drinking or having a good time. I mean, Salieri, actually. It's even noted in the. In the article that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that he didn't drink. He's Italian. He doesn't drink.

23:58 Wes: But he did have eight. Eight kids and a mistress.

24:02 Erin: There you go. There you go. That's a lot better than the. Than the. The filmic Salieri. But, yeah, you know what I mean? Like, it's. It's. That seems to be the problem. He doesn't really understand people or life or fun or anything that has to do with real life. You can't really live like a pre. And I don't mean that you. You have to go out and have a lot of sex and get drunk and stuff like that. But I also don't think that you can live a fully aesthetic life. And. Well, unless you're Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dickinson or something like, I don't know, like you'd have to have a really exceptionally strange personality in order to. In order to live that way and

24:44 Wes: still produce works of genius to live aesthetically and still.

24:48 Erin: Yeah, I think so, yeah, I mean, in certain instances, I know it can actually maybe even be a benefit. But I'd say in Salieri's case, there's something. There's a chip missing there.

25:01 Wes: Yeah. It's kind of an interesting contrast, maybe between an obsessional character and a perverse character. Notably, he doesn't ask to be the voice of God. Right. The thing that he calls Mozart over and over again. He asks to be given a voice that can be used to glorify God, but not to have God speak through him, maybe, if I'm getting that right. And so it's not in the mode of inspiration or being taken over by the muse or something like that. It's more about work ethic and discipline. And that's where the asceticism, the moral asceticism fits in. You can't be creative unless all your energies are directed away from the lower things in life towards this one thing. So maybe this is. You know, I had this thought actually when I was watching the film. It's a comparison I don't think you're going to like, between Cuckoo's Nest and this, where it's like Nurse Ratched versus.

26:02 Erin: Oh, sure.

26:03 Wes: But it's. Yeah. So it's a little bit of a Dionysus, maybe, versus the Apollonian here, or it's not quite it, but, you know, the Dionysian versus someone who's much more rigid.

26:17 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's what I'm talking about with the fact that Salieri seems to have one parent and Mozart really two. I mean, it's sneaky, but he seems to be actually the fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian because he's. Because as a great musician, that Apollonian element is already baked in. Right. Those structures are already there.

26:38 Wes: Yeah. There's a lot of formal complexity and structures, as you put it. But, I mean, as a character, though, he does seem to me to be lopsided, like the Only. When does he seem like an adult? I mean, there's an adult like feeling to him when he's composing, when he's at the pool table you know, concentrating, or at the end of the film, when he's involved in creating music. In a way, a serious side of him does seem to come out in those. In those moments, because he's engaged with sublimity and this almost maybe a worshipful quality, but there's an intensity about it. But, yeah, I don't think of him. There's no maturity to him at any other point, is there?

27:20 Erin: No, I Don't think so. That's another interesting element of genius we might hone in on. Or specifically this child star kind of genius where Mozart really seems, I mean, you know, of course whenever I say that, I mean the film Mozart, he really needs a keeper. It seems he needs someone to take care of him, someone to be the responsible one. He needs some guardrail and that, you know, like Stanzi working to make sure that he's actually getting money or, you know, it seems this, this relationship with the parent and the child who is a child star, is one which hobbles their ability to really be a grown up for the rest of their lives. And yet as you've already said, the parents determination to imbue the child with all of these gifts puts them in this other category where they can't really function in the real world, where they are not really part of normal human society. You know, they become a performing monkey, as Salieri's father says. You know, they become in essence a freak. Of course they have these, these freakish gifts already that are then also properly developed and properly channeled. It's like they're, they're lopsided or they're, you know, one can imagine that they're almost like top heavy or they have these. If we're to sort externalize it in a kind of metaphor, part of their body is abnormally huge and they need like some apparatus to get themselves around because they have some big head and so they keep falling over and they need somebody to hold them up or something. You know, they have that kind of dynamic going on inside them and that seems to be part of what genius is or how one part of you is this freakish part. And then maybe the rest of you is underdeveloped or, or maybe even normal, but the freakish part of you is so freakish that you need some support, somebody to take care of, someone to help you navigate the world.

29:11 Wes: Yeah. And I think maybe part of the disappointment of finding out that the beauty of the artistic product is not reflected in the character of the creator. Right. Because immaturity, there's an incompleteness about immaturity. And the exceptional art object is there's a completeness to it. And maybe the wish is that we think that the creative process should be redemptive, right? To be able to be creative like that. In a way that's sort of one of the things that gives life meaning. It should be deep and transformative and make us better people and improve our quality of life overall, not just give us this thing to do when we're not drinking ourselves to death or something like that, or when.

30:01 Erin: Which you can only do when you're drinking yourself to death.

30:03 Wes: Right, right. It really is kind of a paradox, and I think Jung pointed this out very well. He makes some point, the effect that if all your energy is going into creativity, if you become obsessed with that in a way, it can lead to self neglect. There's a kind of narcissistic quality to it. And as we know, Narcissus becomes fascinated with his own image to the point of self neglect and dies looking at himself in the pool. He can't attend to the real self because he's attending to this imaginary, more perfect self. Art is. And other high cultural activities, thinking and art and all sorts of things. I mean, they're supposed to reflect a cultural maturity, I think, and supposed to reflect something that's deeply important in life, and yet they can be accompanied by self destruction, self destructiveness, self neglect.

31:02 Erin: You're making me think of. You know, I'm probably like such a. Such a Salieri, certainly in the magical thinking department, but you're making me remember a time in my life where I thought that if I wasn't. If things weren't going well for me spiritually, that I wouldn't be able to write anything that, like, if I were not doing well, like, doing all the things I needed to do spiritually, that. That kind of channel, you know, that I, like, wasn't. I wouldn't be open to inspiration if I wasn't open to grace, because these things seemed to me so twinned together. And then I. I was obviously, you know, disabused of that notion when I must have been depressed or something, and. And, like, not maybe not going to Mass or something like that, and was then able to write something I thought was really good or something like that. Right. So it's like, wait a minute, that can't work. I mean, and like, I knew logically also that that was not the case. Like, I knew it, but there's. But still, I think when you have those religious structures in your mind, it's very, very difficult to tweeze those things out, to separate them and understand the difference between. I mean, I still don't fully understand it. Right. Like, I don't. Like, this is why I'm kind of struggling to make the distinction in Salieri's way of thinking between inspiration and grace. Sorry. This was related directly to something that you were saying then about Mozart, which now I've, like, lost the thread now that I've embarrassed myself by telling this story. But no, it's not. But yeah, we want or we think that these things should line up because it kind of doesn't make any sense unless they do. And yet we can even see that there's a way in which creativity can have nothing to do with. Even with what it in itself purports to be, which is a collaboration with something greater than yourself. It can ultimately be about going deeper into narcissism, as you're suggesting, even as it may be a work of. A work that shows some kind of deep insight, maybe about other people. Like a play. If you're writing a play. And I mean, this is just an example I could think of. And you're like putting in all these characters that are fully realized and really demonstrate a kind of deep understanding of other people. And one would think that this was a work of self forgetfulness. You can still be working on it to such an extent that it's like a narcissistic. The process of creating it is really narcissistic or something. Is that kind of what you're teasing out from Jung there? Or am I mischaracterizing it?

33:31 Wes: Yeah, I mean, speaking of. Right. You had brought up the relationship between the spiritual. Having your spiritual house in order and being able to be creative. Mozart doesn't seem to think about God at all. But Salieri is obsessed with him and also thinks that Mozart is the voice of God in a sense. So he says after looking at a score of Mozart's, he says on the page it looked like nothing. Beginning, simple, almost comic, just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns like a rusty squeeze box. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note hanging there, unh, unwavering. Until clarinet took it over. Sweetened into a phrase of such delight. This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me I was hearing the voice of God. So it's the voice of God, but in an obscene child. I guess that's the vehicle for the voice of God. How can you be as engaged with the sublime as Mozart is and just not even be thinking about God? How can you be the voice of God if God is not even on your radar?

34:51 Erin: Yeah, I really love that quote because I think it reveals so clearly the soul of Mozart's talent. But how it expresses itself in this way, which is at first seems simple, is childlike. And then it becomes plaintive and about longing and about beauty and I think that's kind of what Mozart is about. That understanding of music, as we've already said, seems to me to be the implicit understanding of God or relationship with God, such as it is in him, or such as he can understand that or that he cares about that or appreciates that.

35:30 Wes: That's very interesting. Yeah. Because Salieri will say later, all I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute. If he didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire like a lust in my body and then deny me the talent? Salieri's longing is to sing to God. But in for Mozart, the longing finds its way into the. The longing is in the music itself, which there's an implied relationship to the divine in that. So unfulfillable longing is necessarily relationship to the divine.

36:03 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That's great. I love that too, that Salieri mentions at one point that he's written 40 operas alone. It's like mute. I don't know, maybe. Maybe you weren't mute enough, but. Yeah, but that relationship to the childlike too is something I wanted to, I wanted to address because I do think that there are Christ like elements. Obviously, if Salieri is this, this priest or this monk of music and Mozart is its fullest incarnation or embodiment, then Mozart is already a sort of implied Christ figure. But I also thought of the holy fool element to his behavior. And I think that that is revealed a bit in even just in that description of Salieri's the squeeze box and the childlike quality, the simplicity that then reveals this hidden depth or that starts to gather to itself some sort of profound implication as it rolls along. The Requiem scenes too are a little reminiscent to me. Maybe this is a stretch, but it occurred to me this time a little reminiscent to me of the agony in the garden, for instance, Salieri saying he won't leave him, you know, Christ sweating blood, you know, in those moments before he's arrested, before the Passion. It's a little reminiscent of that. And of course he's working on the Mass, so one can't not think of that, that Christ like parallel anyway, Salieri kind of, kind of tending to him like one of the apostles and then eventually falling asleep, though Mozart too falls asleep. So it's obviously not a perfect parallel, but there's something of that, you know, staying up, keeping watch during the suffering and the. And in that instance, the Requiem, which is of course it's a Mass, so it's already a prayer and also the working on it for Mozart, also in that metaphor, would become a kind of prayer because Christ is in the garden praying all night. Maybe next time we can focus more on Salieri, on Salieri's relationship to his father and of the inciting miracle of his own, the miracle that allowed his musical training to begin. He calls it this. It's a big joke in the movie. It's a great sight gag. He says a miracle happened. We see his father choking and dying. Talk about some dad issues there. But anyway, so maybe in part two, we can talk a little bit more about Salieri and then also just the court and the dynamics at court and maybe some of the really interesting political arguments that are happening as well.

38:39 Wes: Okay.

38:39 Erin: All right. Thank you.

38:41 Wes: Thank you.